
Class I B S^U 
BobkL_2L5_ 



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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



WHERE THE HIGHER 
CRITICISM FAILS 



OTHER BOOKS BY W. H. FITCHETT 

BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 

A PAWN IN THE GAME 

THE UNREALIZED LOGIC OF RELIGION 

WESLEY AND HIS CENTURY 



WHERE THE HIGHER 
CRITICISM FAILS 

A Critique of the Destructive Critics 



By 
W. H. FITCHETT 




THE METHODIST BOOK CONCERN 
NEW YORK CINCINNATI 



,f 5 



Copyright, 1922, by 
W. H. FITCHETT 



Printed in the United States of America 



©C1A698173 



CONTENTS 

BOOK I 
THE POSITION OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. What Is the Higher Criticism? 9 

II. The Place of the Unlearned in the 

Controversy 16 

III. The "Dancing Dervish" Critic 26 

BOOK II 
THE BIBLE 

Introduction 37 

I. Where Is Religious Certainty to be 

Found? 39 

II. The Bible as a Moral Code 48 

III. Could the Human Mind Frame a Per- 

fect Code? 57 

IV. The Bible as a Living Book 65 

V. How the Pentateuch Has Suffered. . 73 

VI. The Want of a Sense of Humor 83 

VH. What Is the Scope of the Bible? 92 

BOOK III 

ON MIRACLES 

I. The Prejudice of Criticism 99 

II. Three Possible Alternatives 107 

III. The Miracles of the New Testament 116 

IV. The Greatest Miracle of Christian 

History 126 



6 CONTENTS 

BOOK IV 
CHRIST AND THE CRITICS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. The Biography of Christ 135 

II. Christ and the Higher Criticism 144 

III. Did Christ Cast Out Devils? 157 

IV. Opposing Voices 166 

V. The Claims of the Higher Criticism. 172 

Summary 181 



BOOK I 

THE POSITION OF THE 
HIGHER CRITICISM 



"This subject (the Higher Criticism) is not only a matter 
for specialized experts or professional scholars. The discus- 
sion has been left in the past too much to them. Religion, 
after all, is for common men. It is in the region of the com- 
mon reason, at least as much as in the circles of specialized 
study, that it must be judged. This is, most noticeably, the 
assumption of the New Testament. It appeals to the com- 
mon judgment; it summons each man to judge for himself. 
'Why even of yourselves judge ye not what is right?' 
'Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.' These 
words of our Lord and of Saint Paul are a challenge to com- 
mon men." — Bishop Gore in Belief in God. 

"I thank thee, O Father, Lord of Heaven and Earth, be- 
cause thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, 
and hast revealed them unto babes. Even so, Father, for 
so it seemed good in thy sight." — Matthew 11. 25, 26. 



"It is the experience of countless souls that where we touch 
Jesus we do somehow touch the real. . . . We have to under- 
stand Jesus Christ unless our universe is to be chaos." — 
Glover. 



CHAPTER I 
WHAT IS THE HIGHER CRITICISM? 

What is meant by the Higher Criticism, and 
how is it affecting the general Christian faith? 
What is the attitude towards it which ought to be 
taken by the plain man, who has neither the schol- 
arship nor the time to enable him to form an in- 
dependent judgment on the questions it raises, 
but who desires to know the truth, and stands 
ready, at any cost, to accept the truth? Is the 
Higher Criticism, in brief, a folly to be ignored, 
an enemy to be feared, or a friend to be welcomed? 
These are questions which many good people are 
asking just now, and they are certainly questions 
entitled to an answer. 

The "Higher Criticism," of course, is an elastic 
phrase which can be stretched to cover the wildest 
extremes of opinion and the utmost diversity of 
methods. It cannot be defined in a sentence, or 
dismissed by a phrase. It only means — or ought 
to mean — a scientific study of the origin, the 
dates, and the literary structure of the books of 
the Bible ; and it is as legitimate a form of study 
as any other possible to the human mind. An in- 
telligent Christian must be willing, not only 
frankly, but gladly, to accept every conclusion 
about the Bible which has adequate historic proof. 
For truth is the most precious of all things; it 
has absolute authority for both the conscience and 

9 



WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 

the reason. And it concerns us more to know the 
exact truth about God's Word than about any- 
thing else in the world. Life, and character, and 
eternity depend upon it. 

The Higher Criticism beyond doubt has ac- 
complished much good which deserves grateful 
acknowledgment; in a sense we are all "Higher 
Critics." We believe, for example, that Moses 
wrote the Pentateuch, but we do not believe he 
wrote the account of his own funeral with which 
the story closes. We believe, that is — in a wider 
or a narrower sense — in the composite structure 
of the first five books of the Bible. We have 
learned, again, to recognize the human element in 
the Bible, and the progressive nature of the reve- 
lation given in it. The things are not recent dis- 
coveries ; they belong to the A B C of Christian 
faith. The New Testament itself, while declar- 
ring God "spoke to our fathers in time past by the 
prophets," adds that he spoke not only "at 
sundry times" but "by divers portions and in 
divers manners." 

A mother must tell her little child the story of 
how the world was made in other terms than those 
of a science primer. She must, that is, translate 
the facts of science into the terms of the child's 
mind and imagination. The first chapters of 
Genesis, for this reason, are not written in terms 
of science and would have been unintelligible 
through all the centuries before science was born 
if they had used its language. But science deals 
with facts, and the first sentence in Genesis, in 
language which science cannot improve, declares 
the greatest of all facts, that In the begmnmg 
God created the heavens and the earth. 

10 



POSITION OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM 

The Higher Criticism, again, has helped to de- 
liver the faith of some people from the theory of 
an inspiration hard, mechanical, and strictly 
verbal ; a theory which required us to believe that 
the mind of prophet and apostle, under the in- 
spiration of the Holy Spirit, resembled nothing 
so much as a machine, a phonograph record, re- 
producing, with machine-like accuracy, certain 
words. We have to turn back to history to realize 
in what an exaggerated form this view was once 
held. The Declaration of the Helvetic Conven- 
tion of 1675, for example, affirms that "the 
Hebrew text, both as regards consonants and as 
regards vowels — or, if not the vowel points them- 
selves, at least the significance of the points — is 
divinely inspired." The mechanical and verbal 
theory of inspiration was refuted long since, and 
on literary grounds, by De Quincey, in his 
memorable article on "Protestantism." It is 
plainly inconsistent with the facts in the Bible, 
The quotations of passages from the Old Testa- 
ment in the New Testament, for example, are 
marked by curious verbal freedom. Out of two 
hundred and seventy-five Old Testament quota- 
tions in the New Testament there are only sixty- 
three which agree exactly with the Hebrew; in 
thirty-seven cases the quotation is taken from the 
Septuagint, where it does not correctly render the 
Hebrew; there are seventy-six cases in which the 
correct rendering in the Hebrew has been modi- 
fied; and there are ninety-nine passages in which 
the New Testament differs both from the original 
Hebrew and the Septuagint. 1 

Now all this is perfectly intelligible. Chris- 

l New Testament Criticism, J. A. McClymont, D.D., p. 20. 

11 



WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 

tian faith holds that "the writers of the Bible 
wrote and spoke as they were moved by the Holy 
Ghost"; but the inspiration under which they 
acted did not obliterate their human character- 
istics; it acted through them. The inspiration 
was plenary, not verbal; an inspiration which 
makes the Bible the one sufficient and final stand- 
ard for faith and conduct. But the worship of 
the letter is no part of the Christian creed. And 
the inspiration of the Bible is continuous ; it burns 
in the divine words to this very day, and this 
characteristic will mark it till the end of time. It 
is found there as an illuminating and verifying 
force by every devout reader. The belief in the 
composite structure of certain books of the Bible, 
both in the Old and the New Testament, is in no 
way inconsistent with the theory of their inspira- 
tion. The writers, Christian faith holds, were 
divinely directed in their choice of the materials 
used. 

Yet that the Higher Criticism is to multitudes 
a distress and an alarm is beyond denial. There 
is an increasing sense in the mind of the plain 
man that something has happened, or is about to 
happen, which may imperil, or perhaps even 
wreck, his faith. He sees that for many people 
something divine — some quality of authority — 
has slipped out of the Bible, and some enfeebling 
taint of uncertainty has crept into the Bible. It 
seems indeed almost open to doubt whether for 
many people there will soon be any Bible left. Is 
there any justification for these fears? What has 
the Higher Criticism really done and what is it 
going to do ? Is the day coming when there will be 
two Bibles — the Bible of the simple-hearted be- 

12 



POSITION OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM 

liever and the Bible of the scholar; and can the 
Christian faith survive such a spectacle? 

The plain man, of course, realizes that from 
its very nature a book like the Bible, if it does 
not outrun the human mind itself, yet must have 
heights not to be easily climbed; depths too pro- 
found, perhaps, for any human sounding line. 
It must have difficulties which challenge our faith ; 
meanings for which the human mind has hardly 
room. How should it be otherwise? A Bible with 
no more mystery in it than the multiplication 
table has would be too trivial to be a Bible ! And 
what an amazing book the actual Bible, as it lies 
in our hands to-day, is ! All merely human litera- 
ture is insignificant beside it. It has reshaped 
secular history ; it is, visibly, the one hope of the 
human race. If from the civilization of to-day 
the Bible and all the forces which stream from 
it were suddenly withdrawn the world would go to 
wreck. 

Now the mind of the average man cannot in 
the least understand the attitude of many, at 
least, of the Higher Critics towards the Bible. 
They seem to have forgotten history — or to have 
never read it — for they act as though the Bible 
was a book which nobody as yet has succeeded in 
reading; a riddle like that of the Sphinx, which 
twenty centuries have not solved, a message 
written in cipher whose key is still a secret. And 
we must wait — as twenty centuries have waited — 
with what patience we can till the present genera- 
tion of Higher Critics have solved the strange 
riddle of the divine Book and found the key to its 
cipher. 

They seem, in brief, in regard to the Bible to 
13 



WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 

have lost their sense of spiritual values ; they re- 
semble a committee of antiquarian experts ex- 
amining a mummy discovered in some ancient 
tomb. They are trying to discover the exact 
date and structure of the tomb itself, the method, 
and the names of the workmen who constructed 
it. And all the while they miss the living forces 
that stream from the Bible. For the Bible is not 
a mummy; it is not a lay figure to be examined, 
weighed, classified, and quarreled over. It lives ! 
As Luther says, it has hands and feet. The in- 
spiration which moved the holy men of old to write 
these divine pages is in these pages still, and this 
is verified in the spiritual experience of every de- 
vout reader of the Bible. 

And yet this divine Book, which has survived 
so many fires kindled by its enemies, seems — to 
some alarmed people — to be in danger at the pres- 
ent moment of being consumed in a fire stronger 
than any yet known; for it is a flame of learned 
criticism, and is kindled not by the enemies of the 
divine Book but by learned men who are its official 
interpreters and friends. This view, of course, is 
not quite accurate. Fear hardly sees things with 
clear eyes; and fire sometimes has a cleansing 
office. Many angry hammers have beaten on the 
Bible and they are all broken. The divine Book is 
indestructible! But the storm of criticism beat- 
ing on the Bible at the present moment is loud, 
and the average man, who perhaps has had no 
university training and knows nothing of the 
Semitic languages, hears far off the tumult of 
learned voices in conflict about the divine Book, 
and thinks very naturally that in a dispute mov- 
ing at a level of erudition so high he can take no 

14 



POSITION OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM 

part. He can only wait till the experts have come 
to some agreement, no matter how long the proc- 
ess must take; and must accept their "conclu- 
sions" with resigned meekness. But what kind of 
a Bible or of a Christ will be left to him he cannot 
venture to guess. 

And yet even in this high controversy of 
learned men on the Bible the unlearned man has 
responsibilities he dare not shun and rights he 
may not surrender. He has — or may have — a 
knowledge of the Bible and of Christ, vital, inti- 
mate, personal ; a knowledge which the agreement 
of learned men did not give and which their dis- 
agreement need not take away. In his new book, 
Belief m God, Bishop Gore with great force 
argues that the plain man has his own place and 
a right to his own logic in this great controversy. 

"It is not only a matter," he says, "for special- 
ized experts or professional scholars. The dis- 
cussion has been left in the past too much to them. 
Religion, after all, is for common men. It is in 
the region of the common reason, at least as much 
as in the circles of specialized study, that it must 
be judged. This is most noticeably the assump- 
tion of the New Testament. It appeals to the 
common judgment; it summons each man to judge 
for himself. 'Why even of yourselves judge ye 
not what is right? 9 'He that is spiritual judgeth 
all things, and he himself is judged of no man. 9 
These words of our Lord and of Saint Paul are 
a challenge to common men." 1 

l Bd\ef in God, John Murray, p. 20. 



15 



CHAPTER II 

THE PLACE OF THE UNLEARNED IN 
THE CONTROVERSY 

Now perhaps no words in the whole confused 
literature of the Higher Criticism are more sig- 
nificant or cut more sharply into the very heart 
of the great debate than those we have quoted 
from Bishop Gore which we here print again. 
The writer, it must be remembered, is a scholar 
of recognized standing; he is himself a Higher 
Critic, though of the saner kind. His freedom 
from tradition and his intellectual courage are 
shown by the place he filled in the famous Lux 
Mundi which a few years ago so disquieted many 
good people. No charge of being opposed to the 
utmost freedom, both of inquiry and of opinion 
on the subject of the Bible, can be possibly laid 
against Bishop Gore, and he here reminds us that : 

"The discussion is not only a matter for spe- 
cialized experts or professional scholars; it has 
been left in the past too much to them. Religion, 
after all, is for common men. It is in the region 
of the common reason, at least as much as m the 
circle of specialized study, that it must be 
judged" 

The passage we quote from his latest book, in 
brief, is the plea of a scholar, a thinker, and a 
Higher Critic — in the legitimate sense of that 
word — for the right of the plain man, who very 

16 



POSITION OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM 

probably is not a scholar, to be heard in the great 
controversy on which the very fate of the Chris- 
tian religion seems to hang. 

"The common man," says Bishop Gore, "has 
been too long 'denied any place' in it." It has been 
taken for granted by the experts, and silently 
conceded, perhaps, by the "common man" himself, 
that in a debate on a theme so difficult the only 
persons who have the right to be heard are 
trained scholars, who are familiar with Latin and 
Greek and Hebrew and all the forms of the Se- 
mitic dialects, and who have spent their lives in 
the study of ancient manuscripts and in the 
criticism of each other's theories. As for the 
common man, his opinion can have no signifi- 
cance; he possesses, indeed, no right to have an 
opinion on a subject so high! On questions of 
scholarship the authority of scholars is final. 

Now in one sense this is perfectly true and may 
be accepted quite frankly. But some things must 
be both remembered and weighed. It is perhaps 
irrelevant to urge that the common man has a 
direct and profound interest of a personal kind 
in this business. The questions raised by the 
Higher Criticism, as he understands them, cut to 
the very quick of his spiritual life. In some forms 
they disquiet his faith; they seem to give the lie 
to his best hopes and his deepest religious con- 
sciousness. As he sees it they rob the Bible both 
of its message and its authority. He is tempted 
to think — rightly or wrongly — that the Higher 
Criticism takes from him the Christ he knows and 
gives him a Christ whittled down into insignifi- 
cance, a Christ convicted of ignorance and mis- 
takes. The Christ of his hymns and prayers be- 

17 



WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 

neath the acid of the Higher Criticism turns out 
to be a mournfully unmiraculous figure! 

But if all this be true, yet in this great debate 
— or in any controversy — Truth cannot be sac- 
rificed to Pity. No interest worth having can 
ever be injured by the truth; truth in any realm 
and at any cost is the highest interest of man. 
But the most significant fact — and perhaps the 
fact most generally forgotten in the whole debate 
— is the fact that those conclusions of the Higher 
Criticism which alone disquiet Christian opinion 
and can alone be hostile to any Christian interest 
do not spring from difficulties of scholarship, dif- 
ficulties of which only scholars can judge. They 
do not arise from the discovery, say, of flaws 
in the text of the Bible, or of manuscripts yet 
more ancient than those known when the Bible 
was last revised, and which give, say, some new 
and disturbing vision of the character and acts 
of Christ, and in this way threaten to wreck 
Christian faith. Nothing of the sort has hap- 
pened. 

There is a wide area of the subjects covered 
by the Higher Criticism controversy which comes: 
under the authority and award not of scholarship 
but of plain common sense; and within that area 
the "common man" is himself the expert, and has 
the authority of the expert. In Gulliver's Travels, 
it will be remembered, Swift described for the 
entertainment of mankind the philosophers of 
Laputa and the new, scientific, and "philosophic" 
plan they had devised for building a house. The 
roof — not the foundation — had to be constructed 
first, in the thin air. Now the "common man" 
does not need himself to become a philosopher and 

18 



POSITION OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM 

to graduate in some Laputan university before 
he is entitled to criticize the Laputan system of 
building houses. As a matter of fact the first 
roof set up on the Laputan plan, in thin air, 
refuted the philosophers who invented the system 
by tumbling on their heads. Building houses is 
a matter on which the common man is an expert, 
and all the philosophers in Laputa could not per- 
suade him to pull down his own house and recon- 
struct it on a "philosophical" plan. 

And the plain fact is that many of the methods 
used and of the "conclusions" reached by the 
Higher Criticism, when set in the daylight of 
plainj sensQ and Jooked at with clear vision, are 
in quarrel with the fundamental reasoning in- 
stinct — the plain common sense — with its stub- 
born loyalty to facts set in the human soul by 
God Himself — set there in authority over human 
actions ; which in its way is as authoritative as a 
page in the Bible, and without which the only 
residence for which a man is qualified is an idiot 
asylum. Now it can be shown that the Higher 
Criticism — in some of its forms, over a wide area 
of its literature, and many of its conclusions — is 
in quarrel with this fundamental reasoning in- 
stinct set in man's nature. And this fact robs 
of their weight exactly those of its conclusions 
which most disquiet Christian people, since they 
stand in this very category. 

The Higher Criticism, of course, does not pre- 
tend to be an exact science. Science has its as- 
certained and verified certainties, certainties 
which stand good through all debates and are 
accepted universally as final. A controversialist 
who, without any special and original knowledge 

19 



WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 

of electricity, set his opinion on the subject 
against that of Sir Oliver Lodge, or who, knowing 
nothing of mathematics or physical science, un- 
dertook to argue with Professor Murray on the 
structure of the atom, would justly and per- 
emptorily be dismissed from the debate. 

"Medicine, 55 says a well-known writer, "ad- 
vances over the bodies of its dead theories. 
Each of these serves a purpose; few indeed sur- 
vive beyond a limited period." For medicine is> 
a science; theories, for it, are provisional, and 
are worthless except they lead to facts and are 
verified by facts. For every form of science aims 
at reaching certainties; it builds its conclusions 
on verified and verifiable facts. For the Fact 
is final; it ends debate; it holds good for all and 
in all disputes. But the Higher Criticism is not 
in the category of the exact sciences. To an 
extent which is not easily realized, it is a shadow 
dance of theories; of theories which remain 
theories to the end and which commonly die 
young. They are often both ingenious and honest 
theories. Sometimes, too, they are almost 
childish in their foolishness. But always they 
remain theories ; any element of hard and uni- 
versally admitted facts is seldom found in them. 
When the revision of the Authorized Version was 
undertaken it was the work of a confederation of 
the best living scholars drawn from every church. 
These were sub-divided into three Committees, 
two of the Committees doing the detailed work 
of revision and their results in turn being revised 
by the third or Supervising Committee; in this 
way the eccentricities of individual translators 
were effaced and a translation produced which 



POSITION OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM 

represented the agreed scholarship of the Chris- 
tian faith. But imagine a similar Conference, 
composed of Higher Critics of varying altitudes, 
sitting in judgment on each other's theories! 
Who can imagine that any agreed finality of 
views over the whole area of subjects dealt with 
would emerge? The unwritten law of the Higher 
Criticism is that every critic has the right to 
frame the theory which best satisfies his own per- 
sonal judgment. There are no central and uni- 
versally admitted facts: by which all theories must 
be true and to which all must conform. Some- 
times, indeed, as in the case of the archaeological 
discoveries of Sir William Ramsay, a bit of his- 
toric evidence which every critic must accept 
emerges ; and in this way the conservative school 
of the Higher Critics has gained greatly. Some- 
times, again, a flash of impatient common sense 
from some critic of high standing breaks through 
the general mist of gyrating theories and has 
historic effect. Thus in 1897 Harnack — one of 
the great scholars of our time, and a Higher 
Critic of fame — in his Chronology of Ancient 
Christian Literature wrote a dozen sentences 
which "made history." "There was a time," he 
said, "and the general public is still at that date, 
when it was considered necessary to hold the most 
ancient Christian literature, including the New 
Testament, as a tissue of deception and falsehood. 
That time has now passed. For science it was 
an episode during which she learned much and 
after which she has much to forget. The results 
of my investigations go in a reactionary sense far 
beyond what one might call the moderate position 
in the criticism of to-day. The most ancient 

21 



WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 

literature of the Church is in all chief points, and 
in the majority of details, veracious and worthy 
of belief from the point of view of literary history. 
In the whole New Testament there is probably 
only one work which can, in the strictest sense of 
the word, be called pseudonymous. It is 2 Peter. 
. . . In our criticism of the most ancient 
sources of Christianity, we are, without any 
doubt, in course of returning to tradition." 
Since those words, from the pen of a scholar who 
had himself been one of the most authoritative if 
not destructive critics of his day were published, 
the "traditional dates" of the New Testament 
writings ought to pass without serious challenge. 
But almost every critic in turn insists in evolv- 
ing his own private theory and so we descend at 
last to the cranks of what is called the "open- 
court" in America. One group of theorists there 
held that Jesus belonged to the Aryan race and 
was not a Jew at all. Another professor entered 
the field to prove that Jesus was not born at 
all, that the name "Jesus" was only a title, a 
Hebrew form of the Greek soter (Saviour), under 
which the Jews found Zeus, or Jupiter, worshiped 
by the Greeks. Yet another critic came forward 
to maintain that Jesus was no other than Buddha 
himself, clothed in Jewish Messianic apparel. 1 
In the absence of any agreed method of dealing 
with the questions of the Higher Criticism, the 
universal freedom claimed by every critic to re- 
ject facts or dates or names of which he does not 
approve, or which do not fit in with his theories, 
makes the whole field of this criticism what the 
familiar earth would look like if the law of grav- 

Weto Testament Criticism, J. A. McClymont, D.D., p. 150. 

22 



POSITION OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM 

itatlon somehow ceased to act in irregular patches 
on its surfaces. The literature of the Higher 
Criticism consists, in the main, of the criticism 
of each other's theories, and resembles, a cynic 
might suggest, the industrial occupation of the 
community, real or imagined, who "got their liv- 
ing by taking in each other's washing." The 
Higher Criticism, it must be repeated, knows 
nothing of "certainties" ; it is a world of theorists 
and of theories. It is a realm in which no writ 
runs, and no authority exists, failure to recognize 
which means the dismissal of the person guilty 
of such folly from further notice. As a result 
a large part of the Higher Criticism is a land- 
scape with no settled features, a witches' dance 
of theories and guesses which come like shadows 
and go like shadows: we give an example of the 
extravagance to which theorists go in the next 
chapter entitled "The 'Dancing Dervish' Variety 
of the Higher Criticism." 

Some theories — usually those thrown up from 
German brains — in scale and height, in their ap- 
parent massiveness and their menacing quality, 
resemble the simooms, the dancing columns of hot 
sand, seen sometimes whirling across the desolate 
wastes of sand in Upper Egypt. They are but 
gyrating masses! of hot dust, blown about by 
tempests of fiery winds ; for a time they are very 
impressive but they sink back to the desolate 
stretch of sand-hills whence they came. Some 
theories — those usually of English birth — have 
the scale and the brief beauty of the summer 
clouds in an English sky, and they are as tran- 
sitory as the clouds. Judged by practical com- 
mon sense they have the quality and weight of 

23 



WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 

so much vapor, and like vapor a change of tem- 
perature in the atmosphere kills them. Theories 
are not facts and can never have the enduring 
qualities of facts. 

Some of the methods and the conclusions of 
the Higher Critics, again, have only to be looked 
at with a reasonably quick vision of the ridiculous 
and the effect is deadly. The method, for ex- 
ample, which on the evidence of differences in 
literary style discovers and solemnly labels a 
hundred "editors," "redactors," and "compilers" 
in proof, say, of the composite authorship of the 
Pentateuch, if applied to English literature would 
produce a hundred Macaulays to explain his 
History of England and a thousand Shakespeares 
to account adequately for the difference of style in 
the immortal plays. The literary method in this 
section of Higher Criticism, as we show later, 
when judged by plain common sense is almost a 
jest. The universal assumption — an assumption 
absolutely unproved, and incapable of proof — 
which marks these theories and gives them their 
disquieting quality is an offense to common sense 
which cannot lightly be forgiven. 

When again we realize on how many points 
there is no agreed opinion amongst the Higher 
Critics — that while they may make common cause 
against outsiders, they differ among themselves, 
and differ vehemently — may not common sense 
suggest that till these "experts" agree we cannot 
be sure, not only as to which of them is the true 
expert, but whether any of them is? For they 
refute each other ! What spectacle, again, can be 
a greater shock to every instinct of awe than that 
of a committee of the Higher Critics gather- 

24 



POSITION OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM 

ing round the figure of Christ, each with a little 
foot rule of his own, and all bent on dissecting the 
mind and soul and character of Christ and finding 
out where knowledge in him ends and ignorance 
begins, and reporting with confidence how on some 
subjects their own larger information is able to 
correct that ignorance? To worship Christ is 
the first and the very deepest of Christian in- 
stincts. But to weigh him in critical scales, to 
pluck away the veil of awe and mystery which 
hangs about him, to undertake to catalogue his 
limitations, — that surely to reverent Christian 
faith may well seem if not impiety, yet an offense 
to reason against which every instinct of common 
sense protests. And a great scholar like Bishop 
Gore — himself a true and accomplished Higher 
Critic — tells the world that the voice of the com- 
mon man in this realm has a right to be heard 
and ought to have been heard earlier. 

And surely what Bishop Gore says is a cor- 
respondence deep and mysterious, beyond our 
power to comprehend, with the words of Jesus 
Christ, "I thank Thee, O Father, Lord of heaven 
and earth, because Thou hast hid these things 
from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them 
unto babes. Even so, Father, for so it seemed 
good in Thy sight." x 

Matthew 11. 25, 26. 



95 



CHAPTER III 

THE "DANCING DERVISH" VARIETY OF 
THE HIGHER CRITICISM 

In its widest sense the "Higher Criticism" 
takes in the theories and speculations of every- 
one, who, taking the Bible as his subject, whether 
to defend it or to attack it, chooses to describe 
himself as a Higher Critic; but much of it is a 
literature which has no serious meaning and on 
which no serious thought need be spent. We 
venture to give an example of the literature of the 
Higher Criticism of the wilder type, which the 
common sense of the plain man may peremptorily 
dismiss from notice as pure nonsense which needs 
no notice. 

In a recent number of the Hibbert Journal is 
an article by Professor Preserved Smith, a well- 
known American scholar, entitled "A New Light 
on the Relations of Peter and Paul." It consists 
of about seventeen pages filled with a sort of 
witches' dance of unbelieving "explanations" of 
the New Testament, of semi-lunatic guesses, of 
things taken for granted which ought to be 
proved, of specious and absolutely unverified 
statements. And the article is not solitary ; it is< 
the type of a literature. If Professor Preserved 
Smith's version of the gospel is true — and he is 
a scholar of reputation — of course it must be 
accepted. The truth first and always; the truth 

26 



POSITION OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM 

though the heavens fall ! But as a matter of fact 
it is only a splutter of foolish ink, without a tinc- 
ture of either sense or fact in it, cast lightly on 
the sacred pages of the Bible. In all the seven- 
teen pages which leave us spiritually bankrupt 
scarcely a sentence of sober or reasoned argument 
can be discovered. What does such an article 
in that case deserve? And that this is really the 
case let the plain man judge from a brief analysis 
of this particular article. 

Professor Preserved Smith undertakes to show 
that the two stories which discredit Peter — his 
attempt to "rebuke" Christ and his denial of 
Christ — are pure inventions, and grew out of the 
fact that Peter and Paul had totally different 
readings of the gospel. Peter denied the fact 
of the passion and of all the incidents of the 
passion and on some occasion he stated his view 
to Paul. To him this naturally seemed the very 
denial of his Lord. "As the conversation con- 
tinued, or at other times took another turn," says 
Preserved Smith with a calm certainty, as though 
he had been present, "Peter, with great emphasis, 
said, 'I know not this man of whom you speak.' " 
He meant "the man" who was condemned by the 
high priests, crucified by Pilate, and who rose 
again from the dead. Peter knew nothing — that 
is, we are asked to believe — of the trial of Christ, 
of his crucifixion, or of his resurrection. Now to 
Paul this was equivalent to the direct denial of 
the Lord, and we are assured by Professor Pre- 
served Smith "he passed the anecdotes on to the 
faithful Mark, the evangelist, who wrote them 
in the form in which we have them, and placed 
them, one at the first mention of the passion and 

27 



WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 

the other at the crucifixion itself." So we are in- 
vited to believe on the private authority of Pre- 
served Smith that the story of Peter's denial of 
Christ is "a Pauline scandal." What Peter was 
really guilty of is a vaster "denial" still, a denial 
of the passion. "It is now generally recognized 
by liberal scholars," says Professor Preserved 
Smith, "that considerable portions of the gospel 
are unhistoric." Loisy, it seems, "has demon- 
strated" that the fourth Gospel is unhistoric. "If 
it were possible," argues Preserved Smith, "thus 
to write, and get accepted as historical, what may 
be described (without offense, I hope) as a fic- 
titious life of Jesus, what guarantee have we that 
the early evangelists were not equally free in 
their methods?" "Since Strauss," he says, "it 
has been the fashion to disregard the miracles." 
Loisy, he assures us, describes Luke as "not a 
scrupulous historian," and "it is quite probable 
that Mark invented an anecdote in the interests 
of a theory." Solomon Reinach, it seems, "argues 
strongly against accepting the passion as a 
fact"; and another Smith — W. P., this time — 
has proposed "an immensely clever Irypothesis to 
account for the whole gospel story" without giv- 
ing any place to the historicity of the central 
Figure. 

There is no pretense of proving these con- 
clusions. It is "the fashion" to disregard the 
miracles; it is "quite probable" that Mark lied. 
Somebody has proposed "an immensely clever 
hypothesis," which dismisses Christ from history. 
"That Jesus should predict his death at the hands 
of the chief priests," we are told, "is 'a plain 
anachronism.' " It is not disproved that Christ 

28 



POSITION OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM 

made that prediction; it is quietly taken for 
granted that he could not make it. The whole 
story of Peter's denial is dismissed as "intrinsi- 
cally improbable." The difference between Paul 
and Peter, it seems, arose out of the circumstance 
that Paul invented the story that Christ was 
crucified and rose from the dead; but while he 
"knew nothing save Christ and him crucified," 
the Church at Jerusalem apparently knew much 
else of Christ but nothing of this. It had never 
heard, it seems, of the cross and of the empty 
grave in the garden ! No critic, we are told, will 
trust the Acts of the Apostles. That book "is 
so apologetic that it does not hesitate to distort 
the facts in the interest of piety." 

Rut is it credible that- the cross is a late Pauline 
invention and that the Church of Jerusalem knew 
nothing about it? Paul invented the fable of the 
crucifixion and published it everywhere, though 
the entire population of Jerusalem must have 
known it was a lie. We cannot get Peter's opinion 
on the subject; through his letters certainly runs, 
like some crimson thread, the story of the Christ 
who "bore our sins in his own body on the tree" ; 
but his letters, Professor Preserved Smith as- 
sured us, are "late, spurious, and Paulinized." 
James, too, we are told, "apparently knows noth- 
ing of the passion of Jesus." That portion of 
Mark's Gospel labeled "Q" knows absolutely noth- 
ing of it. The vehemence with which Paul de- 
clares he "knew nothing save Christ and him cruci- 
fied," we are invited to believe, is "suspicious." 
It looks as if he "knew he was introducing a novel 
conception," which must be urged with more vigor 
in proportion as it was strange. "Scholars," 

29 



WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 

says Preserved Smith, "are coming to see ever 
more clearly" that Paul's central doctrine, in a 
word, has no historic fact behind it. 

"The decisive element in Paul's consciousness," 
at the moment he "set up his own mystically 
evolved" notion of Christ's passion and death, 
we are told, ". . . was assuredly a primitive and 
widespread vegetation or initiation myth of the 
dying and rising God, common to both Oriental 
religions and to the Greeks." So the cross is dis- 
missed. It is the sole invention of Paul, and he 
stole it from an Oriental myth ! Luke, of course, 
was in the conspiracy with Paul; and "any one 
who compares Luke with his sources," says Pro- 
fessor Preserved Smith, "must be convinced that 
he omitted, altered, added, with an utter disregard 
of history, as the facts contradicted his idea of 
edification." But Preserved Smith invents the 
delightful theory that there was "a treaty" 
betwixt Paul and Peter, by which "the territory 
was divided into spheres of influence in which each 
might propagate his own ideas." "Probably," he 
says, "Peter and his friends cared little what 
Paul taught so long as he taught only the 
heathen, with whom they would have nothing to 
do" ; and the tolerance of the new fictitious gospel 
was made easier by "Paul's promise to send money 
to the saints at Jerusalem." 

Here, then, is a form of the Higher Criticism 
which is more exquisitely ridiculous — since it 
takes itself seriously — than Whately's famous 
essay designed to prove that Napoleon was a 
myth; and, it may be added, it is more deadly 
than any form of open infidelity. In our hymns 
and prayers and worship to-day we are simply 

30 



POSITION OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM 

inheriting and repeating the "widespread initia- 
tion or vegetation idolatry of an. Oriental re- 
ligion." Was ever so much accomplished by so 
little? The sermon on Mars Hill, when with the 
white^columned Parthenon above him and the 
waters of Salamis gleaming in the distance before 
him Paul told an Athenian audience that "the 
times of their ignorance God winked at, but now 
commanded all men everywhere to repent," is a 
bit of immortal literature. But Professor Pre- 
served Smith has discovered that in the act and 
moment of that great discourse, Paul was preach- 
ing the very idolatry he rebuked! When he 
"preached Jesus and the resurrection," he was 
only offering these Athenians a weed plucked 
from the ancient and decaying swamp of their 
own heathenism. Paul did not know this. 

The listening Athenians did not know it; they 
failed to recognize their own native myth. But 
Professor Preserved Smith, listening through his 
ear-trumpet across twenty stormy centuries, is 
not to be deceived. He knows better! Paul is 
really preaching Dionysus, a not too decent 
divinity of Greek mythology; the "youthful, 
beautiful, but effeminate god of wine," to quote 
the classical dictionaries, the deity known to 
Roman satirists and to bibulous modern poets as 
Bacchus. 

As Professor Preserved Smith, through his 
spectacles, contemplates the midnight scene in 
Gethsemane, the bowed figure of Christ, with the 
red blood-drops on his brow, it becomes to him 
nothing but a vegetation myth translated into 
personal terms. All the emotions of awe and 
reverence, of adoring love and faith, which that 

31 



WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 

scene has awakened in the hearts of the saints of 
twenty centuries — and still awakens — are only 
a bit of disguised Bacchus-worship. And all 
this is published in the Hibbert Journal, and there 
is nobody with wit enough to see, or at least with 
courage to say, "This is not scholarship, 
still less is it common sense. It is pure rubbish." 
Not one grain of rational evidence, it must be 
repeated, is offered in support of these monstrous 
"conclusions." They are offered to us as being 
"probably true," as being "reasonable guesses," 
as being "generally recognized by liberal schol- 
ars." For twenty centuries Christianity has 
offered to mankind an Oriental vegetation myth 
under the delusion that it was a Divine Saviour 
who had entered into the life of men for their 
salvation. Our hymn-books, of course, would have 
to be reconstructed, for instead of the cross and 
the redeeming love behind the cross we should 
see, leering at us from every page, a peeping and 
obscene god of heathen mythology; a Bacchus 
astride a barrel and crowned with vine leaves. 

Now the plain man knows that all this is non- 
sense, and he knows it with a certainty surer than 
any knowledge which reaches him through the 
senses. What a reassuring experience it is after 
an hour in the literary company — say of Profes- 
sor Preserved Smith — to read one of the great 
Psalms, into whose cadences are woven the ex- 
periences of a hundred generations of saints ; or 
Paul's Hymn of Praise to Love, or the opening 
sentences of Peter's letter to "the strangers scat- 
tered throughout Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, 
Asia, and Bithynia," with their stately march of 
resounding syllables: "Blessed be the God and 



POSITION OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM 

Father* of our Lord Jesus Christ"; or John's 
angel voice pleading, "Beloved, let us love one 
another, for love is of God, and every one that 
loveth is born of God and knoweth God." Or 
better still, to hear Christ's voice speaking across 
the centuries, "Abide in me and I in you." 

These great passages prove themselves. The 
air of eternity seems to breathe through every 
syllable. They have an atmosphere as clean as 
that which lies on Alpine snows; a white purity 
as of a chrysolite; a light such as never was on 
sea or shore. Above all, there is in them an 
authority which runs back into eternity for its 
source, and to which our deepest spiritual nature 
answers with the authority and certainty of our 
instinct. 

It would be, of course, a monstrous injustice to 
hold critics — the saner critics of to-day — men 
like Dr. Foakes Jackson, Professor Peake, Pro- 
fessor James Moffatt, or H. D. Major, responsible 
for this nonsense. They are incapable of for- 
giving it, still less of producing it. But the 
Higher Criticism is responsible for its cranks; it 
grows them! it fails to refute them! Professor 
Preserved Smith's article is an example of the 
degree in which whole sections of literature of 
the Higher Criticism fails at the point of mere 
saving common sense. It may be dismissed with 
a gesture. 



33 



BOOK II 
THE BIBLE 



"If the universe is rational the distinction between right 
and wrong must be clear, definite, reliable, . . . otherwise 
human life is the voyage of a derelict, without chart, or helm, 
or port." — Gloveb. 

"By all that he requires of me 
I know what God himself must be." 



INTRODUCTION 

The Higher Criticism, in its British form at 
least, fails, among other reasons, because on three 
subjects — subjects which go to the very heart of 
the Christian faith, and by which indeed that f aitk 
stands or falls — it talks with two voices. In 
regard to them it cannot quite make up its mind ; 
it tries to walk in two opposite directions at the 
same moment of time, a feat which no pair of 
human legs, theological or other, has yet suc- 
ceeded in doing. These three subjects are: 

(1 ) The Bible: Can it be accepted as an author- 
itative standard of religious truth? 

(2) Miracles: Are those recorded in the New 
Testament to be regarded as historically true? 

(3) The Person and Nature of Jesus Christ: 
Is he the Incarnate Son of God in the sense in 
which the Nicene Creed recites it; u • . . God 
of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God, 
begotten and not made ... by whom all things 
were made: Who for us men and our salvation 
came down from heaven. . . ."? 

On these three great questions the Higher 
Criticism resembles Bunyan's Mr. Facing-Both- 
Ways, who, we are told, "was a waterman, and 
got his living by looking one way and going the 
other." 

Now as regards the British Higher Criticism 
it is perhaps unfair to generalize, for it cannot 
be classified; it has no distinct and what may be 
called corporate existence. In German theology 
— on the subject of the miraculous in particular 

37 



WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 

— there was always some school or some com- 
manding and representative figure which might be 
fairly taken as representative of the religious 
thought and scholarship of Germany on these 
subjects. Opinion on them ran like a visible 
stream between recognized banks; it was possible 
to say what was the state of the German theo- 
logical mind on these subjects. It is not so with 
what we have called the British form of the 
Higher Criticism. It has no distinct schools and 
though the general standard of scholarship is 
good there is no figure entitled to speak for the 
whole movement. 

At the present moment, however, the Modern- 
ists in the Church of England are taking a defi- 
nite and visible form and have a certain represen- 
tative value; w^hile among what are called the 
Free Churches Professor Peake, a Christian 
scholar of standing, has just published a Com- 
mentary on the Bible, with a list of sixty-one 
contributors, all with a certain claim to scholar- 
ship. In a strict sense the book has no represen- 
tative value; each writer in it is responsible for 
his own contribution, and takes no responsibilty 
for the other writers ; but Professor Peake himself 
claims that the book gives — or rather "is designed 
to give" — "the generally accepted results of Bib- 
lical criticism, interpretation, history, and theol- 
ogy." This is, on the part of Professor Peake 
himself, we venture to think, a too enthusiastic 
description of his Commentary, but it supplies 
a reason for taking, for our purpose, what is 
published in the Commentary as a fair represen- 
tation of at least one shade of British Higher 
Criticism. 

38 



CHAPTER I 

WHERE IS RELIGIOUS CERTAINTY TO 
BE FOUND 

The Higher Criticism, as we have said, fails at 
some of the most important points because in 
regard to them it talks with two voices; it en- 
deavors to travel in two opposite directions at 
the same moment. Its symbol, as far as these 
subjects are concerned, is Bunyan's Mr. Facing- 
Both-Ways. In Peake's Commentary, for ex- 
ample, Dr. E. Griffith- Jones, the Principal of the 
United College, Bradford, discusses the question 
of the supposed authority of the Bible as the 
ultimate standard of religious truth; and speak- 
ing for the Higher Criticism he undertakes to 
define where, for simple men, that "ultimate 
standard of religious truth" is to be found. No 
subject, of course, can be more important than 
this. In the waste of perilous seas what, for the 
captain of the ship, is more important than the 
accuracy of his charts and the reliability of his 
compass? The whole interval between shipwreck 
and safety depends on them. 

Now the position of the Higher Criticism on 
this subject could find no more persuasive ad- 
vocate than Principal Griffith-Jones. He is a 
scholar, a thinker; his English is beautiful; his 
sentences flow with the music as of a running 

39 



WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 

stream in them. He is, personally, a sincere 
Christian, and when he tells us that "it is the 
testimony of the Christian conscience in all ages 
that to find Jesus is to find God," it is clear that 
he has this divine experience, this personal knowl- 
edge of a personal Christ; though it may be sus- 
pected that this high experience had its origin 
in a period when the Higher Criticism was for 
Principal Griffith-Jones a realm as yet unknown 
and untrodden. But he keeps that great ex- 
perience still and no one will doubt the sincerity 
of his Christian faith. 

To the question: "What is the authoritative 
standard of religious truth?" every church is 
bound to give an answer and may be judged by 
the answer it gives. Principal Griffith-Jones, for 
his part, begins by saying that such an authority 
"can be found only in the revealed will of God," 
a proposition which everybody will gladly accept. 
He then proceeds to open up a very wide field of 
debate on the various forms in which, and the 
channels through which, that priceless knowledge 
comes. 

He deals first with the claim of the mystic. The 
mystic rejects all appeal to external authority; 
the conscience, he holds, can only be illuminated 
from within, and he claims to reach the knowledge 
of God by means of "the inner light." Principal 
Griffith- Jones compliments the mystics on "the 
priceless services rendered by them to religion." 
"They are right," he says, "in claiming the pos- 
sibility of an immediate vision of the divine," but 
their method, he thinks, is "too subjective in 
character." "Mysticism," in his conclusion, "is 
one way of coming into fruitful touch with the 

40 



THE BIBLE 

divine realities, though it is not the only way nor 
is it a sure way; it is too subjective in character" 
(p. 7). Principal Griffith- Jones, it will be seen, 
balances on his tight-rope gracefully and with 
skill. At the climax of his argument it will be 
found his own way of attaining this priceless 
knowledge bears a surprising resemblance to that 
of the mystic. 

Next the claim of the church is discussed, and 
Principal Griffith- Jones holds that the church has 
the advantage over mysticism, in that "she ex- 
presses the collective consciousness of believers," 
a really splendid compliment which would satisfy 
- — and perhaps even astonish — the proudest Pope 
who ever sat in the Vatican. Then comes the 
other note : the church "has failed as an infallible 
source of divine knowledge" ; she "has never really 
spoken at one time with consentient voice," not 
even, apparently, when she was expressing "the 
collective consciousness of believers." The church 
is dismissed with the argument that as she did 
not create the Bible she is not an infallible au- 
thority on religious truth; such an authority no 
doubt exists, but it is to be found elsewhere than 
in the church. 

Then comes the Protestant claim, that this 
authority is to be found in the Bible, the divinely 
inspired record of the spiritual training of our 
race and of the revelation of himself God has 
made through inspired men, and by the acts and 
teaching of Jesus Christ. In this, all Protestants 
claim, is to be found the ultimate standard of 
religious truth. Principal Griffith-Jones deals 
with this claim promptly and firmly. "For cen- 
turies," he admits, "it was possible to hold this 

41 



WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 

theory with sincerity and with confidence" ; and 
what has happened since to destroy that faith? 
Here Principal Griffith-Jones consults his Higher 
Criticism and is able to make short work of the 
Protestant claims. "The rise of historical and 
linguistic criticism," he says, "has finally de- 
stroyed these claims" (p. 8). It is not explained 
how this remarkable fact was accomplished but 
the fact, it seems, is beyond denial. The Prot- 
estant Bible is more completely wrecked as a 
standard of authority than the dream of the 
mystic or of the arrogant claim of the Roman 
Catholic. It is "destroyed, and destroyed 
finally," a circumstance which of course leaves it 
without hope of resurrection. Nothing remains 
except to bury the corpse and dry our tears. At 
this point, however, Principal Griffith-Jones pulls 
out the other stop in his brain and proceeds to 
explain that the corpse is really not dead. When 
all the claims of the Bible to be a standard of reli- 
gious truth are destroyed, and even "destroyed 
finally," this, the reader is assured, "of course 
does not mean" what it certainly said, that "the 
Bible is devoid of authority for the discovery and 
exposition of the divine mind and will" (p. 8). 
"It still remains an incontrovertible because ex- 
perimental truth that out of the Bible a Divine 
Voice speaks; and when the authentic accent of 
that voice comes home to us we cannot for a mo- 
ment doubt that we are face to face with the ulti- 
mate authority over the human soul" (p. 8). 

A corpse in and through which the divine mind 
speaks is a somewhat puzzling conception, nor 
does Principal Griffith-Jones help to clear the 
confusion by saying that "this"— the existence of 

42 



THE BIBLE 

a Divine Voice which speaks from the Bible with 
such authoritative accents — "is quite other than 
affirming the infallible authority of the Bible as 
a written revelation." The Book, like the church 
and the mystic, points to some one beyond itself. 
But what a confusion of metaphors and of mean- 
ings we have here ! What more exactly opposite 
statements can be imagined? Can a thing both 
be and not be at the same time? A Divine Voice 
speaks from the Bible — even after it is dead — 
Principal Griffith- Jones admits ; and when the au- 
thoritative accents of that voice reach to us, "we 
cannot, of course, for a moment doubt that we are 
face to face with the ultimate authority on reli- 
gious truth" ; and what more than this has the 
Protestant faith about the Bible ever claimed? 
If Principal Griffith-Jones discusses the Protes- 
tant faith about the Bible he must take it in the 
sense in which Protestants themselves hold it. 
They do not believe that the divine authority of 
the Bible resides in the cover of the book, nor 
even in the printed characters on the pages. 
They recognize that the divine essence of the Bible 
is the Inspiring and Interpreting Spirit of God 
which uses it as a channel; an Influence and a 
Presence, flowing through it as the waters of a 
stream flow within its banks. 

But Principal Griffith-Jones proceeds to con- 
sider whether those who claim "that the value of 
the Bible lies in the fact that it contains the reve- 
lation of the Son of God, who is himself the ulti- 
mate authority for Christian believers," are cor- 
rect, and he concedes that this, "properly under- 
stood, is a profound truth." He adds : "It is the 
testimony of the Christian consciousness in all 

43 



WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 

ages that to find Jesus is to find God. Beyond 
him we cannot go in our search for the Eternal, 
who in him has spoken his will as in no one else." 
This is finely said; and here then, at last, surely 
our search is ended. To what or to whom shall 
we go beyond the living Christ in search of an 
authoritative standard of religious truth? At 
this point, however, Principal Griffith-Jones pro- 
ceeds once more to consult what may be called the 
Higher Critical side of his brain. "This claim for 
the ultimate character of the divine revelation of 
Jesus Christ," he warns us, "is sometimes affirmed 
in a way difficult any longer to accept," and he 
proceeds quite cheerfully to set in order the rea- 
sons — they make a formidable list — which forbid 
us to accept even Jesus Christ as the authorita- 
tive source of religious truth. 

His analysis of the limitations of Christ is a 
melancholy bit of literature which is discussed at 
length elsewhere in these pages. It consists of 
the statements that Jesus was "a Jew of the first 
century," with the culture and outlook on life 
which belonged to that age; he "knew little or 
nothing of Greek philosophy or of Roman law." 
As for his teaching, "it is impossible to prove in 
any particular case that we have his ipsissima 
verba," since he wrote nothing. He is clearly in 
error on some questions of history. We have no 
strictly contemporaneous record of his life and 
teaching. "It is only when we come to him for 
light on the nature of God, whose redeeming grace 
is willing to help us, that we discover in Jesus a 
revelation, a saving power, which finds its cor- 
roboration to-day as in all ages since the days of 
the flesh in the triumphant experiences of believ- 

44 



THE BIBLE 

ing men and women" (p. 8). This seems to give 
us something solid for our feet; but even when 
lie has reached this point Principal Griffith-Jones 
again hedges. We are "free to exercise a sane 
judgment on the applicability of many of 
Christ's maxims for our own time." We can sit 
in judgment, that is, on Christ's teachings, and 
correct them by our "saner" opinion. 

At this stage Principal Griffith-Jones stops, 
and the bewildered reader will have to ask, Where, 
after all, is the authoritative standard of reli- 
gious truth to be found? Principal Griffith- Jones, 
it seems, finds it in the depths of his own subjec- 
tive consciousness, in "the experience of redemp- 
tion, peace, and joy which comes from the knowl- 
edge of Jesus Christ." This deep and sacred 
experience is no doubt, for one who knows it, de- 
cisive; but there are some questions which still 
clamor for an answer. Principal Griffith-Jones 
must have accepted the authority of the written 
record of the Bible concerning Jesus Christ and 
his redeeming work before that subjective spirit- 
ual consciousness awoke in him of which he 
speaks. Now which of these two factors in his 
spiritual experience was the cause, which, the 
effect? Principal Griffith- Jones did not first ex- 
perience that inward joy, and then believe in the 
gospel recorded in the Bible. Faith in the truth 
of the written revelation must have preceded in 
the order of time the blissful subjective conscious- 
ness of which Principal Griffith- Jones speaks ; for 
the effect cannot precede the cause. And so the 
written record, which we were informed so con- 
fidently had been "finally destroyed," emerges 
triumphantly — though Principal Griffith-Jones 

45 



WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 

does not see it, and would be unwilling to say it — 
as an ultimate force in religion. 

It isi clear, it may be added, that the subjective 
spiritual experience, of which Principal Griffith- 
Jones speaks in such glowing tones, holds good 
for himself but certainly is no authority for those 
who do not possess it. On his reading of the 
problem — it is the reading of his version of the 
Higher Criticism — there is no authoritative 
standard of religious truth possible for any man 
but that which he can find in his own conscious- 
ness; and for one who is without this inner feel- 
ing no authoritative standard of religious truth 
exists. Surely a distressing, not to say a deplor- 
able, conclusion! It may be asked, too, in what 
does this subjective mood of his own conscious- 
ness, on which Principal Griffith-Jones rests as an 
authoritative standard of religious truth, differ 
from the "inner light" of the mystic, "which we 
have been! assured at the outset was untrust- 
worthy" ? 

It is clear that a psychological puzzle of a very 
curious sort lies in what may be called the mind of 
the Higher Criticism as represented by Principal 
Griffith- Jones. It would be both unjust and 
absurd to suspect the perfect sincerity of Princi- 
pal Griffith-Jones, but his logic certainly has the 
characteristic of looking one way and going an- 
other. His article is an example of the habit of 
talking on a single subject with two voices, which 
we have said characterizes so much of the litera- 
ture of a certain type of the Higher Criticism. 
In his search for the authoritative standard of 
religious truth he certainly delivers himself of two 
opposite verdicts on each of the points discussed. 

46 



THE BIBLE 

In his silvery and transparent English he makes! a 
statement on one side so clear and so persuasive 
that it seems final; he then draws round it a 
nimbus of admiring words, and the reader feels 
that here is finality reached, and reached at a 
step. ; The next moment we are offered, in English 
equally pellucid and soothing, an almost exactly 
opposite statement; and it, too, in its turn, is 
padded and recommended to our acceptance by a 
chain of admiring adjectives. At the end of the 
whole process the astonished reader discovers that 
while he was looking east he was, as a matter of 
fact, traveling west. The very proposition — that 
of the mystics — against which we are warned at 
the beginning of Principal Griffith-Jones 5 argu- 
ment, is almost precisely that which under a 
slightly different name survives and is recom- 
mended at the end. The explanation of this, we 
venture to suggest, is that Principal Griffith- 
Jones keeps his simple and adoring Christian 
faith and his variety of the Higher Criticism in 
separate compartments both of his memory and 
of his intelligence. He can see a totally different 
landscape and speaks quite a different language 
as he employs one or the other as the lens through 
which he studies any question. When the captain 
of a ship takes an observation of the sun at noon 
to learn what is the exact position of his ship, 
he sails in a sense by the arithmetic of the stars. 
Principal Griffith-Jones in his scheme of spiritual 
navigation adjusts the eternal stars to the tick- 
ing of his wristlet watch* 



4f 



CHAPTER II 

THE BIBLE AS A MORAL CODE 

In the literature of the Higher Criticism, as its 
wiser friends will admit with a sigh, an absurdly 
disproportionate amount of ink is often spent on 
the comparatively little things and a tragical 
blindness to the great things in the Bible; and 
this is particularly the case in dealing with the 
Old Testament writings. These are treated as 
though they were documents, say, in a Chancery 
suit and their validity depended on the dates 
upon which they were written and on the identi- 
fication of the persons who wrote them. Who 
that understands anything of literature will not 
sigh — or smile — as he watches the expenditure of 
ink and toil and learning spent on tearing up the 
oldest documents of the Bible into tiny fragments 
and discovering or inventing the writer to whom 
by the single test of style each fragment is to be 
assigned ? The Old Testament Scriptures, as far 
as the critics can effect it, emerge in a very 
ragged condition from the process. Deuteron- 
omy, for example — the book which has perhaps 
more of spiritual force in it than any other book 
in the Pentateuch, and from which Jesus Christ 
himself quoted most — emerges robbed of spiritual 
value and branded as a forgery. Canon Barnes, 
to judge by what he has written and preached, 
apparently thinks the Old Testament begins at 

48 



THE BIBLE 

Amos; he is never weary of calling attention to 
what he thinks is its deplorably unscientific char- 
acter. He cannot forgive the writer of Genesis 
for not writing his account of the creation of the 
world in language which the President of the 
British Association of to-day would use. 

But a graver defect in the literature of the 
Higher Criticism is the curious blindness shown 
to what is the unique distinction of the Penta- 
teuch, and the surest mark of its divine inspira- 
tion — the fact that alone of all the sacred books 
of the world it not only reveals God as being him- 
self a God of righteousness ; it gives a plan of 
human duties, framed by the mind of God, made 
imperative by his authority and reflecting, though 
in rude terms, his character. This — a scheme 
of human duties set in relationship to God — is 
the great thing, the unique thing, in the opening 
pages of the Bible. Classic Greece, in the golden 
age of its literature, with iEschylus and Soph- 
ocles as its dramatists, Plato and Aristotle as 
its thinkers, and Socrates as its conscience, knew 
nothing of deities who made morality imperative 
on human life, or who, indeed, had any morals 
of their own. It is exactly the same with the 
gods of imperial Rome. As Pope's familiar 
couplet describes them, they were 

"Gods, changeful, partial, passionate, unjust, 
Whose attributes were rage, revenge, and lust." 

If the gods of Greece and Rome took human 
form and came among us to-day we should have 
to send for the police; the jail or the hangman's 
rope would be their inevitable fate. Perhaps the 

49 



WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 

best moralists Rome produced were Seneca and 
Marcus Aurelius, "the Caesar of the changeless 
face." 

Much admiring ink has been spent on Seneca 
and perhaps no man had ever greater opportuni- 
ties — or failed in them more tragically. He was 
the tutor of Nero as a lad, became his prime 
minister when his pupil became emperor, and 
gained enormous wealth in that post. He united 
in himself the functions of a moralist and an 
apologist for the crimes of Nero. The dreadful 
letter he wrote to the Senate explaining why Nero 
had murdered his mother sufficiently illustrates 
his quality as a moralist. There was a certain 
half-pathetic sincerity in Seneca which makes 
some of his critics kind to his faults, but Carlyle 
describes him with cruel accuracy as "perhaps the 
niceliest proportioned half and half, the plausi- 
blest Plausible on record, studying to serve well 
with Philosophy and not ill with Nero." 

Among pagan characters again, Marcus 
Aurelius shines with a pale and melancholy luster ; 
"the Caesar of the changeless face." Renan de- 
scribed the diary of Marcus, The Booh of the 
Thoughts, as "a genuine and eternal gospel," 
which "would never grow old, as it affirms no 
dogma." Renan himself, when he wrote that, had 
parted company with the Christian gospel. It 
had "grown old," he said, "in certain parts. 
Science no longer allows us to admit the naive de- 
scription of the supernatural which is its base. 
Yet science might destroy God and the soul, and 
The Book of the Thoughts would remain young in 
its life and truth." But, somehow, "science" has 
not "destroyed God" ; it has only made his signa- 

50 



THE BIBLE 

ture on everything more legible. And what more 
cruel verdict could be passed on the philosophy of 
Marcus Aurelius than the claim that it would ex- 
actly suit a state of things from which both God 
and the soul had been expelled! As Glover puts 
it in his fine work, The Conflict of Religions m 
the Early Roman Empires, "Renan is right. 
When science or anything else 'destroys God and 
the soul' there is no gospel but that of Marcus, 
and yet for man it is impossible; and it is not 
young, it is senile." Duty without enthusiasm, 
hope, or belief — what is that worth to man ? How 
will it serve us in the shpck and strain of life? It 
has never served or saved men. "The world," 
says Glover, "did not accept Marcusj as a teacher. 
Men readily recognized his high character, but 
for a thousand years and more nobody dreamed 
of taking him as a guide." Stoicism, in fact, 
died with Marcus Aurelius. It failed to capture 
its own century. 

The character of Marcus Aurelius, however, 
had a certain fatigued and melancholy beauty 
about it. Marcus himself is described by F. W. 
Myers as "the saint and exemplar of Agnosti- 
cism." He was a man who "neither believed nor 
disbelieved," and therefore he was tragically in- 
effective. He "did not believe enough to be 
great." Even in the realm of conduct he was in- 
effective. He was the husband of Faustina, a 
crowned courtesan; his sons were vile beyond 
words. He hated vice, but there was not enough 
flame in his hate to burn vice up. He condoned it 
or ignored it. His creed was the essence of melan- 
choly. He found "decay in the substance of all 
things. He resolved the visible universe into 

51 



WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 

nothing but water, dust, bones, and stench." 
Marcus Aurelius disbelieved in oracles and yet he 
threw two lions with spices into the Danube be- 
cause an oracle assured him he would win a great 
victory by doing so. But the lions, being flung 
into the river, swam ashore on the further bank 
and the victory fell to the Germans. On the name 
of Marcus Aurelius, it may be added, lies the 
shame of two great persecutions of the Chris- 
tians of his day. In that of 166 a. d., Polycarp 
perished; in that of 177 a. d., Irenseus died. 
Christianity supplied the victims — saintly men, 
tender women, and even little children — and 
Marcus Aurelius supplied the flames, the swords, 
the lions, by which they perished. And in the 
judgment of some the figure of the Christ of the 
Gospel, who inspired these saints, "pales" when 
set against the figure of the Roman emperor who 
slew them! 

Laws of conduct framed by God and made im- 
perative by his will were the starting-point and 
still are the one condition of all effective morality, 
and this fact carries with it some implications of 
infinite importance. A code which represents 
God's ideals of human conduct must carry with it 
a revelation of his own character, for we cannot 
suppose that God can impose on his creature a 
different — still less a higher — morality than his 
own. And the conclusion is inevitable that these 
homely duties, which fit so exactly and with such 
blessed results into our commonplace lives, must 
be — translated into the terms of his own nature 
— the conditions on which God acts. This will 
be seen — perhaps with less shock to the imagina- 
tion — if we take an illustration from the New 

52 



THE BIBLE 

Testament. Christ, for example, told Peter that 
the measure of the forgiveness he must extend to 
one who wronged him was not to seven times but 
to seventy times seven; and if God requires his 
creatures to forgive each other on the "seventy 
times seven" scale, is it thinkable that he will 
limit his forgiving grace to the "seven times" 
scale? In the parable of the Good Samaritan, 
again, we have the grace of pity — the scale of 
human duty when challenged by human need — as 
God defines it. The priest "passed by" the figure 
of the man lying wounded and robbed "on the 
other side"; the Levite, with peeping curiosity, 
came near the fallen man to examine his wounds 
and then he too "passed on." The Samaritan 
alone obeyed the law of pity and did it with effort 
and cost to himself. Which of the three figures 
— the priest, the Levite, or the Samaritan — can 
we imagine best represents God and what God 
will do? The Samaritan's act and his homely 
form of service to the wounded man — his wine and 
oil, his two pennies — when multiplied into the 
scale of infinity explain the redeeming work of 
Jesus — the bloody sweat of Gethsemane, the 
dying anguish of his Cross, the broken grave of 
his resurrection. 

Let it be realized again how human life itself 
is lifted up to heights of meaning and sacredness 
beyond imagination when its homely duties are 
set in relation to God, reflect his will, are en- 
forced by his infinite authority, and will be re- 
warded by his loving bounty. Science teaches us 
that the physical universe is a unit; the wild 
flower in the grass has relations with the sun, 
ninety-three million miles distant, and borrows 

53 



WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 

its color from it; the wheeling planets determine 
the march of the seasons, and so our daily bread 
catches their rhythm. And the spiritual universe, 
too, is a unit, and that is why our human ethics 
must be in rhythm with the moral ideals of the 
infinite Ruler of all its orders and ranks. 

But it may be asked, Can we imagine the In- 
finite God stooping to a task so lowly, to frame a 
code of duty for our human lives — lives so petty 
in scale, so brief in span? Science, however, 
shows that God is as wonderful in the infinitesimal 
as he is in the infinite. Nothing is too great for 
him and nothing too lowly. In the microscopic 
atom — the ultimate form of matter, too small for 
our senses to grasp — he hides a cluster of in- 
finitesimal points of flame, a reflex ofi the Pleiades, 
wheeling in microscopic courses like the courses 
of the planets in the vastness of illimitable space. 
And God's wonders in the spiritual order are at 
least as manifold as those he works in the physical 
realm. 

For God it must be a necessity, imposed alike 
by his love and his justice, that he shall complete 
the environment of our nature by giving it a 
divinely framed code of conduct. Man is some- 
thing more than an animal; he belongs to the 
ethical order and God has set deep in his nature 
that mysterious force we call conscience, with its 
vision of right and wrong, its power to warn, to 
punish. Shall not God, who has planted this 
faculty in our nature, give to it the law which is 
the standard by which it judges? Man's nature 
is so made that without a religion it droops and 
withers, and shall he who made the soul on this 
pattern mock his own handiwork by denying it 

54 



THE BIBLE 

that which is the condition of its happiness? To 
say that God cannot do it is to impeach his 
power. It assumes that he who made the tongue 
cannot himself speak, or will not. He who formed 
the brain has left himself no organ by which he 
can speak to man's mind. He who gave us rea- 
son and speech is lower than his own creatures. 
We can speak to each other, but he cannot, or 
will not, speak to us. But to say that God 
could give us a code of conduct but has not done 
it is to impeach his goodness. For he who erected 
in man's soul the conscience and has denied to it 
the revelation of a moral law cannot himself be 
a moral being. He made the soul for religion as 
he made the eye for light, and yet he has withheld 
the revelation which makes religion possible. No 
organ is found all through nature without its 
corresponding element. The eye presupposes 
light, and light waits for it. What a mockery 
the lungs would be if found in a world that re- 
fused them air; or the ear in an atmosphere in- 
capable of transmitting sound! Physical nature, 
even though it be, as Tennyson describes it, "red 
in tooth and claw," has no such cruel and con- 
founding riddles. But the highest thing the 
created universe knows, the soul of man, is ex- 
actly such a cruel riddle. It was made for the 
knowledge of God, but God has denied that 
knowledge and shut up his creature in a darkness 
that makes only blind guesses possible. It makes 
Christ an impostor. This, in brief, is a theory 
which denies pity to God and hope to man. 

"If the universe," says Glover, "is rational, the 
distinction between right and wrong must be 
clear, definite, reliable, . • . otherwise human 

55 



WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 

life is the voyage of a derelict, without chart, or 
helm, and without a port." But God has not left 
life without divine direction, nor his universe so 
threaded with law throughout the whole kingdom 
of matter without any element of law in morals. 
The universe is rational ; happiness for moral be- 
ings depends on agreement with the ideals of the 
Creator. And the laws of conduct which God 
imposes on us are a revelation — in practical terms 
— of his own character. This makes their sacred- 
ness, their beauty, their resistless claim to obedi- 
ence. Written in what we are sometimes tempted 
in our folly to think is the iron alphabet of law, 
they are yet that sacred thing, a revelation not 
onlv of God's will but of his character: 

"By all that he requires of me 
I know what God himself must be." 



56 



CHAPTER III 

COULD THE HUMAN MIND FRAME A 
PERFECT CODE? 

How perfect is the code of laws laid by a Divine 
Hand upon us ! In its earliest form it is level to 
the understanding of a child, a chain of simple 
prohibitions — "Thou shalt not" — and the safety 
of human society stands on those divinely framed 
negatives. They put the guard of God's au- 
thority and power round the social order, round 
life, and property, and character, and home. 

But what are called the Ten Commandments 
are only the first line in the great law of duty 
which God lays on us. In its full development it 
takes the master-force of love and translates all 
duty into its terms; and this gives to duty its 
all-comprehending quality. It is the glory of the 
Bible, its deep and eternal distinction, the quality 
which separates it from the religious codes of all 
other religions, that it puts conduct under the 
direction not so much of a code of minute regula- 
tions but under the empire of spiritual forces, 
"Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself 3 ; here 
are seven words, and it is impossible to specify 
any human relation that would not be made sweet, 
or any human act which would not be robbed of 
every element of evil, if ruled by the spirit of 
those seven divine words. And it is easy to see 
why love fulfills all the many far-reaching offices 

57 



WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 

of law; how it gives purity to every motive. It 
is in a sense a force universal and eternal; it is 
the very nature of God, for he is Love. And it 
is by this he binds us to himself as well as to each 
other; for the ethical universe, like the physical 
universe, is a unit. "Thou shalt love the Lord 
thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, 
and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength" 
is the first and great commandment. If such a 
love exists between a human soul and God all the 
relations and duties of human life that run God- 
ward — and they are highest of all — are perfect. 
And the force which makes perfect our relations 
with God makes perfect, too, our relations with 
our fellow beings. Let us imagine a town in which 
love linked together with its own deep and endur- 
ing strength all its inhabitants. In such a town 
the police would have no office, law courts would 
be unnecessary, no jail need be built, no door 
would require a key, there would be no strikes, no 
divorce courts. Yes ! Love is the fulfilling of all 
laws. 

And who will challenge the beauty and the effec- 
tiveness of the divine law? Always the morality 
— not of Christians, alas ! but of Christianity — is 
the best evidence of its divine origin and quality. 
Its ideal of life shines above men's eyes as the 
stars do and it can as little be dimmed or dis- 
placed as the stars. The instinctive conscience 
of the race everywhere and always countersigns, 
though in bitter self-condemnation, its laws. 
Skeptics have attacked everything else in Chris- 
tianity — its evidences, its history, its philosophy, 
its miracles, its dogmas — but its morality has 
always silenced them. They cannot improve it; 

58 



THE BIBLE 

they dare not reject it. Those who have fled 
furthest, and with most of bitter recoil, from 
Christianity as a scheme of doctrine have had to 
come back to it for a morality. To quote Gold- 
win Smith, not himself a very orthodox Christian, 
"The fundamental principles of morality were 
enunciated by an unscientific peasant of Galilee, 
who died upon the cross eighteen centuries ago !" 

It is true that men of distinguished ability who, 
somehow, have either never had or have lost their 
faith in the Christian faith, have drawn up plans 
for human society other than those found in the 
Bible. But when conscience in rhythm with the 
will of God disappears, what can take its place? 
Shall it be the "utility" of John Stuart Mill; the 
"persistent instinct, innate or partly acquired," 
of Darwin; the "conduciveness to happiness" of 
Herbert Spencer; the "utterance of the public 
spirit of the race" of Leslie Stephen ; the "effect of 
social rules enforced by penalty" of Professor 
Bain? Bentham says that the very word "ought" 
ought to be banished from human language ! But 
suppose it is banished, what remains to govern 
conduct? Is it utility? "Who," asks Martineau, 
"was ever known to make himself a martyr to 
truth in order to taste the pleasures of heroism?" 
Is it social law? This varies with climate and 
latitude and longitude. Slavery is a social law on 
the Congo ; the bowstring in Constantinople ; wife- 
killing in Annam. Is "Nature" to supply us with 
a moral standard? This is to reduce us to the 
level of swine. "Nature," says Renan, "has no 
regard for chastity." The rare and fine spirits 
of our race, touched by what is rarest and finest 
in the Christian atmosphere they breathe, may 

59 



WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 

keep on the highlands of morality. But what of 
the selfish, the sensual, the brutal? The danger- 
point of morals lies with these; and if no divine 
law exists, the reflex of the character and will of 
a divine Law-giver, what shall restrain them? It 
is of these Mr. Justice Stephen bluntly told the 
Positivists, "Your creed can neither hang them 
nor damn them; how then can it govern them?" 

If morality can survive without any divine au- 
thority behind it, why is history so black with the 
records of perished civilizations? No one will 
contend that every doubter is instantly and neces- 
sarily a rogue, any more than any nominal Chris- 
tian is necessarily a saint. But it is well to be 
reminded, sometimes, of the fact that the morality 
of the world hangs on its religion. On every side 
the spectacle is witnessed of men who take the 
ethics of Christianity and try to link them to a 
non-Christian faith. The experiment is desperate. 
It is predoomed. to inevitable failure. It is true 
that the issue thus raised is clouded by the fact 
that unbelief does not at once come to its evil king- 
dom in morals. The very air the doubter breathes 
is charged with Christian forces as with some 
diviner oxygen. The man who rejects the Chris- 
tian faith is himself the child of centuries of faith. 
There are multitudes, thank God, who, after they 
have abandoned historic Christianity, yet cling 
to its ethics. Such men as Huxley, Mill, and 
Spencer are cases in point. Religion, in some 
measure at least, ruled their actions even after it 
had ceased to convince their intellect. They lived 
under the law of Christianity, though they no 
longer accepted its history or believed its theol- 
ogy. But the question, we repeat, is, What, on 

60 



THE BIBLE 

its own principles, is the logical result of unbelief? 
When carried to its inevitable conclusion no au- 
thoritative basis of morals survives. 

Now the point at which many of the Higher 
Critics fail, and fail tragically, is that in their 
analysis of the Bible — their eagerness to dissect 
its literature and dissolve it to its original ele- 
ments — they totally miss the deep and noble char- 
acters in which the law of God as set for human 
conduct is inscribed on that literature. Human 
duties are linked to the name of God and are de- 
scribed with a loftiness and beauty unsurpassed 
in all literature, whether secular or sacred. Much 
criticism is expended on what are called "the curs- 
ing psalms" of the Old Testament — psalms which 
really resemble nothing so much as those "bad ex- 
amination papers" which every school yields. 
They prove that the writers have only imperfectly 
mastered their subjects. But in the book of 
Psalms with what a loftiness and grace the divine 
laws of conduct are sung. Take, for example, 
part of Psalm 19 : 

The law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul: the 

testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple. 
The statutes of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart: 

The commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the 

eyes. 
The fear of the Lord is clean, enduring for ever: The 

judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether. 
More to be desired are they than gold, yea, than much 

fine gold: sweeter also than honey and the honeycomb. 

Nothing in religious literature, as an estimate 
of God's law of duty, surpasses in beauty and 
strength these lines. In what noble if sharp-cut 

61 



WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 

and austere characters, again, human duties are 
described in Psalm 15 : 

Lord, who shall abide in thy tabernacle? Who shall dwell 

in thy holy hill? 
He that walketh uprightly, and worketh righteousness, and 

speaketh the truth in his heart. 
He that backbiteth not with his tongue, nor doeth evil to 

his neighbor, nor taketh up a reproach against his 

neighbor. 
In whose eyes a vile person is contemned: but he honoreth 

them that fear the Lord. He that sweareth to his own 

hurt, and changeth not. 
He that putteth not out his money to usury, nor taketh 

reward against the innocent. He that doeth these things 

shall never be moved. 

In Psalm 119 again the code of human duty is 
translated into a many-linked chant — a chant 
high and sweet, unsurpassed on the same subject 
in literature. Wordsworth's ode on duty is the 
best poem in English literature on this subject: 

"Stern Law-giver! yet thou dost wear 
The Godhead's most benignant grace." 

Its highest note is reached in the lines : 

"Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong, 
And the most ancient heavens through Thee are clean and 
strong." 

But the unknown Jewish singer of Psalm 119 has 
a lyrical note which Wordsworth does not excel, 
and hardly, indeed, reaches: 

Open thou mine eyes 9 that I may behold wondrous things 
out of thy law. . . . My hands will I lift up unto thy 
commandments, which I have loved; and I will meditate 
in thy statutes. . . . Thy statutes have been my songs 
in the house of my pilgrimage. . . . The law of thy 



THE BIBLE 

mouth is better unto me than thousands of gold and silver. 
... I have seen an end of all perfection, but thy com- 
mandment is exceeding broad. Oh, how I love thy law! 
It is my meditation all the day. . . . Thy word is a lamp 
unto my feet, and a light unto my path. 

Now the real friends of the Higher Criticism at 
least must deplore the fact that they are so busy 
dissecting the Old Testament Scriptures in search 
of dates and authors that they somehow fail to 
recognize and assert this great characteristic of 
the Old Testament books. 

Let us imagine what effect it would have on the 
world if this contribution the Bible makes to its 
safety — a code of ethics springing from a divine 
root and charged with divine authority — were 
withdrawn. What kind of a world would survive 
if the ethical forces of that divine code suddenly 
slipped from its institutions, its literature, its 
laws, its politics, its domestic life? There are 
few more tragical spectacles, indeed, than that of 
a human life from which the Bible, with its divine 
standard of duty and the relationship with God 
which makes it possible, is dismissed. The spec- 
tacle gains a new sadness when — as is sometimes 
the case — the human life thus impoverished has 
ideals high enough to make it dimly conscious of 
its poverty. 

That well-known writer, Myers, tells the story 
of a memorable interview with George Eliot. "X 
remember how, at Cambridge," he says, "I walked 
with her once in the Fellows Garden of Trinity on 
an evening of rainy May; and she, stirred some- 
what beyond her wont, and taking as her text the 
three words which have been used so often as 
the inspiring trumpet-calls of men — the words 

63 



WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 

'God, Immortality, Duty 5 — pronounced, with 
terrible earnestness, how inconceivable was the 
first, how unbelievable the second, and yet how 
peremptory and absolute the third. 

"Never, perhaps, have sterner accents affirmed 
the sovereignty of impersonal and unrecompens- 
ing law. I listened, and night fell; her grave, 
majestic countenance turned toward me like a 
sibyl's in the gloom; it was as though she with- 
drew from my grasp, one by one, the two scrolls 
of promise and left me the third scroll only, awful 
with inevitable fates. 

"And when we stood at length and parted, amid 
that columnar circuit of the forest trees, beneath 
the last twilight of starless skies, I seemed," says 
Myers, "to be gazing, like Titus at Jerusalem, on 
vacant seats and empty halls — on a sanctuary 
with no Presence to hallow it, and heaven left 
lonely of a God." 

What was it in his talk with George Eliot that 
left in the soul of Myers that sense of utter 
desolation? It was the picture she drew of a 
creedless duty — duty, the stern lawgiver of 
Wordsworth's noble poem, divorced from a per- 
sonal God, its author, and from Immortality, its 
reward. The creed of Christianity: the creed 
which reveals God as our Father, and Christ as 
our Saviour, and the Divine Spirit — the Lord and 
giver of light — as our leader, which makes time 
sacred by linking it to eternity, and gives to this 
little earth a supreme significance by showing it 
to be a training ground for heaven — these facts 
which constitute the Christian Creed alone give 
motive and direction to duty and make it both in- 
telligible and possible. 

64 



CHAPTER IV 
THE BIBLE AS A LIVING BOOK 

It is a fundamental error in Biblical criticism 
to treat the divine book merely as a form of litera- 
ture, with all the limits of literature, to be judged 
by tests of date and authorship and style, etc. 
The Bible is literature in form ; in fact it is litera- 
ture with a tremendous plus; and the temptation 
of the Higher Criticism — an error into which it 
constantly falls — is to forget that plios, and so to 
miss the elements in the Bible which constitute the 
chief reason for its existence. The question at 
issue, first and last, is one of spiritual values, and 
it is precisely these values which so many critics, 
in their concentration on the literary side of the 
Bible, forget; and which as a matter of fact the 
purely literary reading of the Bible wholly misses. 

Let a secular illustration be taken. A bank 
note for £1,000 is in form a literary document and 
is open to literary tests. A score of pertinent 
questions lying in the realm of literature may be 
asked about it. It is printed on special paper; 
but in what mill is this paper manufactured and 
from what material? The form of the lettering is 
peculiar; there are figures on it which plainly 
have secret significance. What is the reason of 
this? The note carries a signature; it may be 
asked, Who is the writer, and is that signature 
genuine? An Act of Parliament of given date is 

65 



WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 

cited as authorizing the issue of the note and 
the question may be raised, Does the note satisfy 
the terms of the Act? All these questions are 
legitimate as bearing on the literary character of 
the note and yet in a sense they are quite irrele- 
vant. They do not touch the real character and 
value of the note. It is, first and last, a symbol 
of values — of money value, exchange value, pur- 
chasing value. The holder can test its purchas- 
ing value only by going into a shop and finding 
out if he can exchange it for goods ; he can test its 
exchange value by paying it into his account at 
the bank and finding out that he has actually 
£1,000 to his credit. 

The note, moreover, has its limitations. It is 
good only for its holder; its value is exhausted in 
a single transaction; after being used once it be- 
comes a bit of worthless paper. What really 
gives its value to the bank note is that which is 
behind it and is represented by the signature it 
carries — the good faith of the nation and its 
whole wealth, and literary tests cannot measure 
that tremendous asset. The dishonor of that 
bank note would represent the bankruptcy of the 
nation, both in pocket and credit. We come to 
values for which, it must be repeated, literature 
has no symbol. The final validity of the note can 
be proved by only one test — the act of the person 
who holds it. He must present the note, and the 
proof of its value is that he personally and ac- 
tually receives its value. 

The tests of literature, it is clear, can be ap- 
plied to the bank note but do not touch, still less 
measure, its real value. And this applies exactly 
to the pages of the Bible. It, too, is literary in 

66 



THE BIBLE 

form, but has values which run far beyond litera- 
ture, to which literary tests do not apply, and 
which they cannot measure. And the critic who 
confines himself to the study of the Bible merely 
as a form of literature and tries it by literary 
tests misses completely that which is the true 
significance of the sacred book — its spiritual 
values. 

Let us take as an illustration an Old Testa- 
ment hymn — Psalm 23. In its literary structure 
it is a poem, and a literary critic may ask, Who 
was its author? or he may study it to discover 
whether it satisfies the laws of poetry. The lan- 
guage in which it was first sung is now dead; we 
know it only as a translation; and the question 
may be asked, When and by whom was the trans- 
lation made, and is it an adequate rendering of 
the original? But when all these questions have 
been asked and answered, the true value of the 
psalm has not been touched. The question is one 
of spiritual values, and these lie outside the realm 
of literature. The psalm is the record of a human 
experience, a revelation of what God, under cer- 
tain conditions, has been to and done for a human 
soul, and in that — on the Christian theory of God 
and the Bible — lies the promise of what God will 
do — do for all time — for every other soul under 
the same conditions. The psalm thus looked at 
is infinitely more than poetry; it is much more 
than the experience of one human soul. It has an 
enduring spiritual value, and is, as we have said, 
for all time a promise for every other human soul 
under the same conditions. And the one question 
worth asking about the psalm is : Does that 
hidden and divine promise in it hold good? Is 

67 



WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 

its story repeated and verified in human experi- 
ence without failure from generation to genera- 
tion? Does it still hold good to-day? These are 
questions which, strange to say, no Higher Critic 
ever asks and which literature cannot answer; 
they lie outside its realm. 

The legitimate and final proof of the spiritual 
value in the psalm is the test of actual human 
experience, and as a matter of fact the psalm 
triumphantly meets that test. It has poured its 
music not only into the hymns of every Christian 
church but into the lives of innumerable men and 
women in every age and under every sky. If it 
were possible to gather them together, what a 
multitude which no man could number would stand 
up and bear witness that the experience set to 
music in that psalm has been repeated in their 
lives. God has been to them a Shepherd; his 
goodness and mercy have followed them through 
life. They have a confidence, through which runs 
a divine note of certainty, born of faith in God's 
character and goodness, that they, too, like the 
singer of that ancient psalm, will "dwell in 
the house of the Lord for ever." This is the true 
value of the Bible ; and it is a value which litera- 
ture cannot read — or give. 

No material symbol, of course, can express 
spiritual values, and that is why the bank note 
for £1,000 which we have used as an illustration 
is quite inadequate as a measure of the values of 
such a psalm which outruns all the tests litera- 
ture knows. The bank note, for example, does 
not grow in value by use and in proportion to the 
number of hands through which it passes. As 
a matter of fact its value for the original holder 

68 



THE BIBLE 

is exhausted in a single transaction; it ceases to 
belong to him; he can only get its value by sur- 
rendering it. But God's acts of grace, such as 
those recorded in Psalm 23 in the Old Testament, 
or in some word of forgiveness, some miracle of 
pity by Christ recorded in the New Testament, 
increase in credibility and value with time and 
use. For they are verified afresh in some human 
experience every moment, and the number of wit- 
nesses grows till it outruns arithmetic. 

A new Bible, in a sense, is being written every 
day, a Bible of verified promises; a Bible of an- 
swered prayers, of new sins forgiven, of new 
mercies coming into a human life and enriching 
it. Christ's gospel in its very nature is not a 
theological or historical puzzle over which 
scholars may hold debates ; still less is it a corpse 
on which a coroner's jury may sit. Its record 
is one of deliverances wrought in human lives, of 
sins forgiven, of a salvation achieved through all 
the ages past. For the mercy which has enriched 
one human life has a witnessing value which runs 
beyond that life and becomes a promise of like 
grace to every other life; and so a new Bible is 
being written every day. If to-day a troubled 
soul whispers to Christ, "Lord, if thou wilt, thou 
canst make me clean," Jesus will answer, as he 
did to that Jewish leper, "I will ; be thou clean" 
(Matthew 8. 3). And oh! the multitude of 
cleansed lives which bear witness to that fact! 
The woman in the gospel said, "If I may but 
touch the hem of his garment I shall be made 
whole," and that touch of faith did bring health. 
Translated into spiritual terms^ this story is 
every hour being repeated. How many trembling 

69 



WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 

hands are even now touching the hem of Christ's 
garment, and finding a healing miracle in the 
touch! How many, like Peter — but sinking in a 
blacker sea than he — cry, "Lord, save me, or I 
perish" ! and how surely to each comes the miracle 
of the outstretched hands of Christ! For the 
gospel is not a finished history two thousand 
years behind us ; it is being repeated every day in 
human lives; it will be repeated still through 
generations unborn till time has run its course. 
Now what office of value has literary criticism 
in such a business? 

The miracles of Christ, it is clear, have two 
values, one momentary and one which has a value 
for all time; one limited to the actual subject of 
the miracle, the other holding good for all human 
souls to the end of time. In every miracle there 
are two elements: (1) the divine pity for the 
sufferer, and that is eternal ; it holds good for all 
human souls and will do to the end of time; (2) 
the divine power that canceled in a breath the mis- 
chiefs of disease and even the arrest of death; 
that is individual in its character; it gave 
strength and health to one human life but the gift 
in its very nature was brief. The miracles of 
Christ were individual and for the moment; they 
did not change the general plan of human exist- 
ence. But the pity for human griefs revealed in 
every miracle, that must be eternal! 

Take the case, for example, of the widow of 
Nain and her dead son (Luke 7. 14). "Young 
man," run the words of Christ, "I say unto thee, 
arise," and at those words the blood, chilled with 
the ice of death in that lad's veins, ran afresh, 
life came back ; but some day death would put its 

70 



THE BIBLE 

cold hand again on that very body. "Weep not," 
said Christ to the broken-hearted mother, 
widowed and childless in the streets of Nain; and 
the music of those words, how far it runs! Its 
sweetness is for all mothers robbed by death. God 
did not make human eyes for tears, and his love 
when it has achieved its whole purpose will wipe 
the tears from all eyes. 

"Stretch forth thine hand," said Christ to the 
man in the synagogue at Capernaum, and at that 
word of power strength thrilled along the wasted 
nerves and muscles and gave back to the strength- 
less hand its natural office. Yet in how brief an 
interval death would cancel that gift of strength 
and turn the hand itself — that hand Christ healed 
— into dust. But the divine pity for human in- 
firmity — for crippled faculties and senses — re- 
vealed in that miracle stands good for all time. 
Each miracle is a prophecy, for when God's re- 
deeming purpose for our race is accomplished 
there will be no frozen senses, no crippled limbs. 
Christ at the grave of Lazarus spoke three words, 
"Lazarus, come forth"; and from the realm of 
death, that realm in which human love has no 
office and the human will no effect, Lazarus came 
forth. In the process of time the grave again 
closed over Lazarus and no second call, "Lazarus, 
come forth," was heard. Christ's miracles, it 
must be repeated, do not change the general con- 
ditions of the race. But what a revelation of 
pity — of pity for human sorrow — eternal in its 
nature and infinite in its resources, in the very 
nature of God, that story reveals! It is pro- 
phetic, a forecast of that redeeming pity in the 
divine nature which will in due time cancel all the 

71 



WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 

thefts of death. Thrice it is recorded that Jesus 
wept — once over Jerusalem, once, as told in 
Hebrews 5 and 7, in his agony, and once by the 
grave of Lazarus. Through those tears we can 
look into the very heart of God. He suffers when 
man, his child, suffers. 

"In every sorrow of the heart 
Eternal mercy bears a part." 

Forasmuch as the children are partakers of flesh and 

blood, 
He also himself likewise took part of the same; 
That, through death, he might destroy him that had the 

power of death, 
. . . and deliver them who through fear of death 
Were all their lifetime subject to bondage. 

Behind every promise of the Bible, behind every 
act of recorded grace, behind the whole plan of 
human redemption revealed in it, stands the 
greatest asset in the universe, the good faith and 
infinite power of God. He must fall bankrupt 
before his promise can fail. Time has for it no 
destroying power ; it grows richer and more cred- 
ible with every passing day by the lives which bear 
witness to its power; for, to quote the words of 
T. R. Glover in his Conflict of Religions m the 
Early Roman Empire, "The gospels are not four, 
but 'ten thousand times ten thousand and thou- 
sands of thousands, 5 and the last word of every 
one of them is 'Lo, I am with you alway, even 
unto the end of the world.' " 

But somehow all this finds no place in the 
literature of the Higher Criticism ! 



n 



CHAPTER V 

HOW THE PENTATEUCH HAS 
SUFFERED 

There can be no doubt as to the composite 
structure of the Pentateuch. The race certainly 
started with some knowledge of God, and this 
would form a common tradition for all the 
branches of the race and explains the fact of 
the traces of the knowledge of such events as the 
deluge and even of a common ethical code found 
in some of the divided groups of the race, as in 
Egypt or Babylonia. These would later have 
some record on clay tablets or carved stone, and 
so be handed down. When Abraham became 
what may be called the spiritual head of the race 
these records of its early religious training would 
come into his hands and be preserved with care; 
Moses would take them as a sacred trust, adding 
to them the larger knowledge God had given to 
him, and arrange them in chronological order, 
employing, no doubt, scribes and copyists — for 
the records were now to find a place in the first 
pages of the sacred book of our race, the Bible. 

All this is intelligible, and the story of the early 
dealings of God with the race — passed down first 
from lip to lip, and then on tablets of clay or 
stone, at last taking written form and becoming 
the opening pages of the Bible — is of great inter- 
est. The process must have been carried out with 

73 



WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 

care and fidelity, as a religious act and under the 
inspiration and guidance of the Holy Spirit. And 
the Higher Critics believe they are able to identify 
by a single test — that of literary style — every 
one who had a part in the business ! The process 
began with Astruc in 1753, has been in operation 
for one hundred and fifty years, and has not even 
yet reached finality. But perhaps on no other 
question in the whole literature of the Higher 
Criticism has such toil been expended and about 
the results of which the critics are so nearly 
unanimous. And yet, tried by plain common sense, 
the methods adopted are an offense to reason, 
and the results reached would if they appeared in 
any department of secular literature — applied, 
say, to Shakespeare or to Macaulay — be regarded 
as a jest. 

In the text of the Pentateuch a vast swarm of 
compilers, editors, redactors, copyists, and critics 
have been invented, and labeled with letters of the 
alphabet. Thus J stands for the writer who used 
the word Jehovah, or Jahweh, for God; E used 
the word Elohim ; P was the writer of the Priestly 
Code; D was the Deuteronomic writer, etc. The 
letter chosen in each case became in time the 
symbol, not of an individual but of a group or 
even of a school of writers, and each of the group, 
too, must in turn be provided with an editor, a 
redactor, a combiner, etc. So we get a J2 and 
E2; P is resolved into PI, P2, P3; there is a 
"Deuteronomic editor" — D2 as well as the origi- 
nal D — besides H. It is assumed there must have 
been some one to combine J with J2, and some one 
else to combine the combined narrative with E, 
and yet another to combine the whole with D. 

74 



THE BIBLE 

There was a redactor, RH, to fit the "Law of 
Holiness" into its "parenetic framework," and 
then H had to be incorporated with P, and that 
again with P2 and P3. Lastly, there was the 
final redactor to interweave the whole in the in- 
tricate manner required by the present critical 
theory. It has become nearly as complicated as 
the Ptolemaic system! Mr. A. H. Finn, whose 
book, The Unity of the Pentateuch, is a model of 
patient and honest criticism, warns us : "There is 
not an atom of evidence that J, E, D, P ever 
existed as separate sources, or that the various 
authors and editors ever existed, or that the three 
or more compilations were ever made, or that the 
book of Joshua was ever connected with the five 
preceding books." 1 

Now it may be safely said that outside this 
army of literary ghosts, represented by letters of 
the alphabet, no writers with brains of so limited 
a character that they could only write in one 
style ever existed. The theory is in conflict with 
literary history; it is an insult to the human in- 
telligence; it would break down if applied to 
modern literature. And we are told bluntly by 
Mr. Finn: "There are improbabilities involved at 
every stage of the critical theory ; improbabilities 
as to the work of J and E ; as to the work of D ; 
as to the work of P, P2, and P3 ; as to the work 
of the redactors; and as to the publication and 
reception of the combined whole. These improba- 
bilities against the several steps must be [not 
added but] multiplied together, and the total im- 
probability against the theory consequently be- 
comes enormous." 2 



iFinn, p. 412. ^Finn, ibid. 

75 



WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 

But it is unnecessary to quote authorities ; the 
present reader, if he has no pretensions to scholar- 
ship, but only sufficient common sense to know a 
foolish thing when he sees it, can judge by only 
looking at the results and seeing in what form the 
Pentateuch emerges as to the value of the theory 
employed by the critics. 

Here, for example, is verse 1 in Deuteronomy 
34 as it stands in the text : 

"And Moses went up from the plains of Moab 
into Mount Nebo to the top of Pisgah, that is 
over against Jericho. And the Lord showed him 
all the land." 

Now it is clear at a glance that the verse has 
no particular "style" about it, still less is it a 
jumble of such entirely conflicting styles that it 
must have taken at least four writers to produce 
it, so it must be broken up into three or four 
fragments and each one assigned to an entirely 
unknown author, labeled with a letter of the 
alphabet. And here is the shape in which it 
appears when the critics have done with it : 

"( JE) And Moses went up (P) from the plains 
of Moab into Mount Nebo (JE) to the top of 
Pisgah, (P) that is over against Jericho. (JE) 
And the Lord showed him all the land." 

It will be seen that JE, in combination, write 
the words "And Moses went up" ; then P thrusts 
in and speaks — "from the plains of Moab unto 
Mount Nebo." JE then takes up the narrative — 
"to the top of Pisgah," and at this point the in- 
trusive P appears afresh with his little bit — "that 
is over against Jericho"; and JE completes the 
duet with the words, "And the Lord showed him 
all the land," etc. Now are those literary ghosts, 

76 



THE BIBLE 

flitting behind the text, and thrusting irrelevantly 
into it, really necessary to make it intelligible? 

The theory on which the text of the earlier 
books of the Bible is dissected, and rearranged, 
and supplied with a long procession of writers — 
editors, redactors, etc. — is simple. It proceeds 
on the assumption that every diversity and 
change of style or opinion has a recognized and 
different writer who can be always identified. 
Thus one writer is methodical and heavy-footed; 
another is graphic and "popular"; a third is 
strong in arithmetic ; and for each varying shade 
in style a new editor, or redactor, has to be in- 
vented. The many-voiced oratorio of the Penta- 
teuch is thus provided with a many-voiced chorus 
of writers. If in the passages ascribed, say, to 
P Or E new phrases are discovered, a totally 
new writer, editor, redactor, or copyist is in- 
vented, labeled with another letter of the alphabet 
to meet the emergency. As a result the list of 
editors and redactors, etc. — all of them literary 
ghosts- — is so long and complex that the mere 
catalogue of symbols — alphabetical or algebrai- 
cal — to represent them stretches through pages. 
If the principle on which the documents of the 
Pentateuch have been thus supplied with an army 
of imaginary writers holds good, why should it 
not be applied to the whole Bible? And if that 
were done, what a totally new and astonishing 
Bible would be the result ! 

Now what faintest authority is there for cut- 
ting up the plainest sentences in the Bible in this 
fashion? It is not scholarship, it is not sane 
criticism, it is not common sense. The whole 
process escapes being dismissed by the universal 

77 



WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 

laughter of mankind owing to the circumstance 
that it is applied to documents of vast antiquity, 
written in languages now dead, and which few 
besides the critics themselves could read. But let 
us suppose the method was applied to books in 
our own language! A secular critic who applied 
this rule, say, to De Quincey, and discovered 
that it took half a dozen De Quinceys to write The 
Confessions of An Opium Eater, would be dis- 
missed with contempt. It is a process which if 
applied to any secular book would seem a bad 
jest. Imagine Macaulay's History of England 
treated on this method. Macaulay, in turn, is 
statistical, picturesque, analytical, satirical; and 
Macaulay was capable, unassisted, of writing in 
all these keys. Could any one persuade us that, 
as a mere fact, there were four Macaulays and 
that it needed a separate writer to attain this 
variety in literary style? Must we believe that 
the Cowper who wrote "John Gilpin" was a 
totally distinct person from the poet who wrote 
"Lines to My Mother's Picture"? If the Higher 
Critics apply their methods to Dickens 5 works 
they must refuse to believe that the characters 
of Mr. Pickwick and of the Fat Boy, of Sarah 
Gamp and of Little Nell could have come from 
the same brain. How many Shakespeares would 
be required to account for the immortal plays? 

It is clear that a theory which has been at work 
for a century and a half, and has undergone a 
score of changes in the process, and yet lies open 
to attack, must have in it some fatal element of 
unsoundness; and there are many signs to-day 
that it is losing popularity. It is a significant 
fact that in his book, The Bible: Its Origin and 

78 



THE BIBLE 

Significance, Dr. Peake himself admits the exist- 
ence of "a certain revolt" against Astruc's sup- 
posed discovery. Eerdmans, for example, was 
the most brilliant of Kuenen's pupils and suc- 
ceeded that great critic in his chair at Leyden. 
He long held Astruc's theory but finally gave it 
up as unsound and even absurd. His defection, 
Peake admits, was "a very ominous fact" (p. 
170). "For why," Peake naturally reflects, 
"should a man go back on his training and his 
earlier faith and confess that he had been com- 
pletely mistaken, unless the reasons were given?" 
And Eterdmans 5 revolt went against the whole 
"documentary analysis" theory. 

Peake dismisses Eerdmans' revolt as "sensa- 
tional rather than momentous"; but Professor 
Welsh, D.D., in his inaugural lecture at the open- 
ing session in 1922 of the New College in Edin- 
burgh — and the New College, it is to be remem- 
bered, is of the first rank in the United King- 
dom as a theological institution — takes the three 
positions on which modern criticism is most 
assured of its "results." The first is the analysis 
of Genesis, founded on the different uses of the 
divine names; the second is the theory that 
Deuteronomy was first brought to light in 621 
B.C., in the reign of Josiah; the third is that 
Ezra, about 440 b. c, completed the Priestly 
Code; and Professor Welsh — who, it must be re- 
membered, speaks not only to a theological school, 
but for a theological school — pronounces the 
whole three to be either uncertain or disproved. 

"Where the critical theory," he said, "had 
erred was in its failure to apply its own princi- 
ples. It had framed an inelastic, rigid theory 

79 



WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 

which it had imposed upon the free movement of 
history, and in particular it had failed to recog- 
nize that in religious matters humanity did not 
advance like a drilled army along the high road. 
Its adherents had believed in the possibility of 
changing the outlook of a generation and the 
religious hopes of a period by a sudden order from 
King Josiah or Ezra or somebody else." 

In the Expository Times, again — of which Dr. 
Hastings, the ablest and at the same time the 
sanest brain in the whole army of critics, is the 
editor — an article by Professor Naville appears, 
in which he dismisses the whole J. E. D. theory 
with a touch of something like contempt. 
"Astruc's idea," he says, "is not a proved fact; 
it is only his personal opinion, his way of ex- 
plaining the irregular employment of the two 
names of God. There is absolutely no proof of 
the existence of these two authors ; they are crea- 
tions of Astruc, based merely on his way of in- 
terpreting the text. 

"The logical order has been entirely reversed; 
it is not the theory which is based on the text. 
It is the text which has to be dismembered, re- 
constructed, and trimmed so that it may harmo- 
nize with the theory." 

The truth is that on this subject there are 
two literatures: (1) that of which Peake's Com- 
mentary is an example, which with docile readi- 
ness accepts both the methods and results of the 
extreme critics, but tries to deodorize them suffi- 
ciently to make them acceptable to the general 
Christian palate; (2) literature of a saner type, 
of which The Problem of the Old Testament, by 
Professor Orr, and The Unity of the Pentateuch, 

80 



THE BIBLE 

by the Rev. A. H. Finn — with a preface by the 
late Bishop of Durham — are examples. Pro- 
fessor Orr's book is a scholarly and sober discus- 
sion of all the subjects involved, leading up to 
conservative results. The Unity of the Penta- 
teuch, by the Rev. A. H. Finn, also stands on the 
conservative side, and is an admirable combina- 
tion of keen logic with a certain flavor of humor ; 
and humor in this business is sometimes even more 
effective than logic. Finn's treatment of the 
"assured results" of the Higher Criticism is a 
very admirable bit of work. On page 379 he 
applies the methods of the Higher Criticism to 
the writings of the most famous of the Higher 
Critics, Dr. S. R. Driver himself ; he takes a chap- 
ter of Dr. Driver's Book of Genesis, and on 
Driver's own methods proves that his book has 
a very "multiple" authorship indeed; at least a 
dozen Dr. Drivers — each with his special char- 
acteristic, his "editor and his redactor" — must 
have taken part in its composition. 

Many of the Higher Critics, of course, believe 
that the theory which has been applied to the 
documents of the Pentateuch has a sort of mathe- 
matical certainty ; and if it is so it ought to be as 
capable of demonstration at any moment and in 
any field as a mathematical proposition is. This 
being so, the holders of the theory have within 
their reach an argument which would be final. A 
principle which holds good and yields such sur- 
prising results when applied to documents in a 
dead language and at least three thousand years 
old ought to yield yet some brilliant and certain 
results if applied to a newspaper only a week old, 
and in a living and familiar language. Let a com- 

81 



WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 

mittee, using — as in the case of the Pentateuch — 
the single test of style, discover how many writers 
are employed in producing a single copy of The 
Times and label them with letters of the alphabet, 
assigning to each his particular contribution; let 
them discover where the leader of the reporting 
staff struck out anything from or added any- 
thing to the report each member of his staff sent 
in; further, let the committee discover and label 
the contributions to the leading columns and de- 
tect every alteration made by the editor. 

The critics, it may be suspected, would refuse 
this test ; they know that their methods would fail 
if applied to yesterday's newspaper and every- 
body else knows it too. But if all this cannot be 
done, and done with success, in the newspaper of 
last week, how can the critics who fail in this 
application of their art pretend to succeed in 
the much more difficult task of successfully ana- 
lyzing all the writers — down to the last copyist 
— in the Pentateuch? 



CHAPTER VI 

THE WANT OF A SENSE OF HUMOR IN 
THE HIGHER CRITICS 

No one can study the literature of the Higher 
Criticism, whether of Germany or Great Britain, 
without finding in it many proofs of a melancholy 
want of the sense of humor in many, at least, of 
the critics themselves. It may be asked, What 
possible office can the sense of humor have in the 
realm of theology, a subject which challenges not 
only the deepest feelings the soul can know but the 
highest powers of the intellect? Has not the 
sense of humor a purely secular office, an office, 
indeed, usually not of a very dignified sort, and 
too often perhaps represented and expressed by 
"the loud laugh that speaks the vacant mind"? 

This, of course, is not quite the case. The 
sense of humor has for the intellect the office of 
a healthy salt. It means, in the last analysis, a 
sense — swift as an instinct and as sure — of the 
relative sizes of things, a quick vision for the ir- 
relevant, for the absurd. To be equipped with 
it means to h&ve a certain balance of the mind 
which saves the possessor from an obstinate, un- 
reasoning bias of opinion on any subject, an 
obsession which makes the sufferer blind to every 
side of a subject except one, a tragical form of 
color-blindness, especially in matters of religion. 
And in the controversial side of religion at least 
the sense of humor has a real and most useful 

83 



WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 

office. There would have been fewer heresies in 
history — or the heresies would have died sooner 
than they did — if theologians had a little more of 
a gift so healthy. The sense of humor has its 
own sudden and instinctive logic against which 
there is no appeal, and it is the servant and safe- 
guard of that divine faculty of reason which, as 
Butler says in his Analogy, is "the only faculty 
we have wherewith to judge concerning every- 
thing, even religion itself." For no more deadly 
injury can be done to religion than to make it 
ridiculous. To be in open quarrel with the gen- 
eral sense of humor in the human mind is for any- 
thing — policy or theory or doctrine — a fatal 
attitude. 

Gibbon was an artist in words even when ex- 
pressing his hatred of religion, and his history is 
studded with sly and clever stabs at it. In his 
account of the great Arian Controversy of the 
fourth century and of the wars which it kindled 
is a dainty but deadly stroke intended to array 
against Christianity the world's sense of humor. 
That controversy, he said, offered mankind the 
spectacle of Christians "killing each other in mil- 
lions over a diphthong," for the difference be- 
tween the two disputed words, Homo-ousion and 
Homoi-ousion, is measured by a diphthong. But 
for how much that diphthong stood! As Carlyle 
puts it, with rough Scottish sense, "If the Arian 
had triumphed there would be no Christianity 
to-day." But Gibbon knew for how much in a 
controversy the sense of humor counted, and it is 
worth remembering that in that famous stab at 
the Christian faith the historian was trying to 
array against it that very force. 

84 



THE BIBLE 

Now too many of the Higher Critics under 
every sky show themselves, in patches at least, de- 
plorably bankrupt in this very sense of humor. 
In the German mind, of course, the sense of humor 
is tragically faint and the attempts of German 
theologians to banish the element of the miracu- 
lous from Christian history supply many proofs 
of the injury theology suffers from the lack of 
a sense of humor in its theologians. The excur- 
sions of German scholars into the realms of the 
non-humorous in order to discredit the stories of 
miracles in the gospels are of almost incredible 
simplicity. 

Thus the Lives of Christ published by Bahrdt 
and Venturini represent an attempt to supply at 
any cost a non-supernatural interpretation of 
the miracle stories of the gospel. The result is 
pages of literature almost as entertaining — 
though without their authors in the least intend- 
ing it — as so many pages in Punch. Venturini, 
for example, undertakes to show how Christ's 
healing miracles were done. 

He never healed, we are assured, without medica- 
ments, and always carried his "portable medical 
chest" with him. In the case of the Syrophoe- 
nician woman's daughter, for example, "we can 
still detect in the narrative a hint of the actual 
course of events. The mother explains the case 
to Jesus. After inquiring where her dwelling was 
he made a sign to John, and continued to hold her 
in conversation. The disciple went to the 
daughter and gave her a sedative and when the 
mother returned she found her child cured. 551 
Venturin i again "explains 55 the miracle at Cana 

Schweitzer, p. 44. 

85 



WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 

with as much intimacy and confidence as though 
he had been there. 

"Jesus had brought with him as a wedding gift 
some jars of good wine and had put them aside in 
another room. When the wine was finished and 
his mother became anxious, he still allowed the 
guests to wait a little, as the stone vessels for 
purification had not yet been filled with water. 
When that had been done he ordered the servants 
to pour out some of his wine, but to tell no one 
whence it came." When John, as an old man, 
wrote his gospel, "he got all this rather mixed 
up — had not indeed observed it very closely at 
the time, had perhaps been the least bit merry 
himself," says Venturini, "and had believed in the 
miracle with the rest." 

Bahrdt shows us that the walking on the sea is 
to be explained by supposing that Jesus walked 
towards the disciples over the surface of a great 
floating raft while they, not being able to see 
the raft, must needs suppose a miracle. When 
Peter tried to walk on the water he failed miser- 
ably. The miracles of healing, Bahrdt holds, are 
to be attributed to the art of Luke. "He also 
called the attention of Jesus to remarkable cases 
of apparent death, which he then took in hand 
and restored the apparently dead to their sorrow- 
ing friends." The resurrection of Jesus Christ 
is explained in the same unconsciously humorous 
way. Jesus had fallen into the hands of the 
Essenes and a fictitious trial and death of Jesus 
had been arranged. As Luke had "prepared the 
body of the Messiah by means of strengthening 
medicines to resist the fearful ill-usage which he 
had gone through— the being dragged about and 

86 



THE BIBLE 

being beaten and finally crucified — these efforts 
were crowned with success. In the cave the most 
strengthening nutriment was supplied to him. 
Since the humors of the body were in a thoroughly 
healthy condition his wounds healed very readily, 
and by the third day he was able to walk, in spite 
of the fact that the wounds made by the nails 
were still open." 

Bahrdt again supplies a non-miraculous ex- 
planation of the feeding of the four thousand. 
Jesus had a cave amply supplied with food, and 
two of the disciples secretly passed parcels of 
food to Jesus as he stood at the entrance to the 
cave. It is worth while remembering that Sanday, 
one of the keenest brains of the British Higher 
Criticism, has an explanation of the Feeding of 
the Four Thousand which for foolishness might 
almost be put beside that of Bahrdt. 

Some Higher Critics of the British variety 
again plainly suffer from a lack of a sense of 
humor almost as tragic as that discoverable in 
German theologians. When Principal Griffith- 
Jones, in Peake's Commentary, for example, 
undertaking to measure and describe the limita- 
tions of Jesus Christ, assures us that the Saviour 
of the world "knew little or nothing of Greek 
philosophy," the most elementary sense of humor 
is offended. For it is natural to speculate how 
Principal Griffith-Jones had discovered that 
patch of ignorance in the mind of Christ. Did 
he put Jesus Christ through an examination in 
Greek philosophy and find that his paper de- 
served very low marks? And if so, why does he 
think it necessary to inform the world of the 
Saviour's ignorance on this particular subject? 

8T 



WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 

Any one who has the remotest acquaintance with 
Greek literature, especially if he has ever read it 
in the original, knows that the highest reach of 
Greek philosophy — the point where it discusses 
divine things — is in the Phsedo of Plato, where 
Socrates, just before he drinks the hemlock, dis- 
cusses with those about him life and death and 
the world beyond death. Now in that story there 
are sentences which might have been taken from 
the New Testament. Who will doubt that 
Socrates, without any intellectual knowledge of 
the historic Christ — he lived some four centuries 
before Christ — had yet caught a gleam of his 
spirit; had drunk something of the divine wine 
which he who wrought the miracle at Cana still 
lifts to human lips? For Jesus Christ, in his 
divine office, was "slain from the foundation of 
the world." Multitudes who never knew his name 
are saved by him, for he lifted the whole race 
from the dawn of time to what may be called 
salvable conditions. Yes, the spirit of Christ 
was in that little room in Athens in which 
Socrates waited his death and talked so divinely 
to his followers; and Principal Griffith- Jones, as 
a scholar, would certainly agree with this. Yet he 
thinks that while Christ, in his office of Saviour, 
knew enough of Greek philosophers as human be- 
ings to be their Saviour, yet knew nothing of their 
philosophy, which — to quote Euclid — "is absurd." 
Can we read these explanations without feeling 
that they need no other refutation than a smile? 
They are incredible from pure foolishness. It 
is worth noticing that with German readers 
Venturini's "explanations are extraordinarily 
popular." Schweitzer, in his Quest of the His- 

88 



THE BIBLE 

torical Jesus, says: "Venturini's Non-super- 
natural History of the Great Prophet of 
Nazareth may almost be said to be reissued 
annually down to the present day, for all the 
fictitious Lives go back directly or indirectly to 
the type which he created." He adds signifi- 
cantly: "Thus it was the fictitious Lives of 
Bahrdt and Venturini which at the end of the 
eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth cen- 
turies first attempted to apply with logical con- 
sistency a non-supernatural interpretation to the 
miracle stories of the gospel." 

And when we hear Christ speaking the great 
words which have reshaped the history of the 
world, words which for all of us measure the 
difference between eternal life and eternal death, 
what can be more ridiculous, from mere dispro- 
portion, than to hear Canon Barnes' piping voice 
assuring us that "clearly the natural ability of 
the Saviour was great" ! 

The critics again are anxious to convict Christ 
of entire ignorance as to the writers of the Old 
Testament books, as they have a theory of that 
authorship totally opposed to his. It is natural 
to suppose that Christ knew who the writers were ; 
and as the writings in dispute were the very books 
which foretold his coming, and were written to 
prepare the way for that coming, the contention, 
in which practically all the Higher Critics join, 
lends itself to humorous treatment at many 
points. Whatever may have been the human 
limitations of Christ during his earthly ministry, 
those limitations must again have ceased when 
the purpose of the Incarnation was achieved, 
when he had accomplished the redemption of our 

89 



WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 

race, had achieved his triumph over death, and 
was able to claim that "All power is given unto 
me in heaven and in earth." Now on this historic 
walk to Emmaus, when Christ, as yet unrecog- 
nized, joined Cleopas and his companion, he asked 
why they wore faces so sad and listened to the 
tale of their doubts. "We trusted," they sighed, 
"it had been he which should have redeemed 
Israel." Christ met them with the rebuke: "O 
fools, and slow of heart to believe all that the 
prophets have spoken . . . and beginning at 
Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto 
them in all the Scriptures the things concerning 
himself." Now if a Higher Critic of to-day — it 
would be cruel to suggest names — had made a 
fourth in that walk and had heard Jesus describ- 
ing the other two as "fools" for their "slowness 
of heart in believing all that Moses and the pro- 
phets had spoken" about him, he certainly would 
have felt himself called to correct the Saviour's 
mistake. "Master," he would have said, "you are 
quite wrong. Moses wrote nothing whatever on 
the subject you speak of and as for the prophets 
nobody can be sure about them. It is precisely 
because these two are not 'fools' that they are 
slow of heart to believe what Moses and all the 
prophets, as you mistakenly suppose, have said 
about you!" 

Later the same evening, to the Twelve, Christ 
repeated what some at least of the Higher Critics 
of to-day would think his deplorable mistake. He 
said to them : "These are the words which I spake 
unto you while I was yet with you, that all things 
must be fulfilled which were written in the law of 
Moses, and in the prophets, and in the psalms, 

90 



THE BIBLE 

concerning me. Then opened he their under- 
standing, that they might understand the Scrip- 
tures, and said unto them, Thus it is written, and 
thus it behoved Christ to suffer, and to rise from 
the dead the third day." In those words Christ 
claims afresh that the things which had been ful- 
filled about him were "written in the law of Moses, 
and in the prophets, and in the psalms." What a 
white flame of ridicule would scorch the figure of 
the critic who in that room and at that moment 
undertook to tell Christ, the Eternal Son of God, 
who had accomplished the salvation of our race, 
that he was entirely ignorant of the subject on 
which he spoke! The sense of humor would sug- 
gest that Christ's words, "O fools, and slow of 
heart not to believe ... all that Moses and the 
prophets have said concerning me," might have 
found another and a quite modern application. 
They run across two thousand years, and are not 
without some personal application for a number 
of learned and very positive theologians of our 
day. Would not a few grains of what we have 
called the wholesomeness of common sense — if not 
of the sense of humor — make even the most posi- 
tive and obstinate of Higher Critics hesitate, and 
begin to doubt his Higher Criticism before he 
ventures to accuse the Risen Christ of ignorance 
of the very Scriptures which foretold him? 



91 



CHAPTER VII 
WHAT IS THE SCOPE OF THE BIBLE? 

The Bible is not merely a record of God's 
method of saving the race ; it is itself a channel — 
one of many channels — through which the saving 
grace of the gospel runs; a force which tran- 
scends all mere literature — deep, enduring, divine, 
and flowing from God himself. The strange 
divine forces in it are as real in the spiritual order 
as gravitation and electricity are in the physical 
order. They can be counted on as surely; their 
action is as much beyond any possibility of doubt. 
No one knows the secret of the Bible who does not 
surrender himself to the action of these forces. 
And the saving forces of the gospel of Jesus 
Christ are not confined to any nation or color; 
they are meant for the race; they are as wide as 
the race. They are wider in their action to-day 
than the visible agencies of the Christian 
churches; and failure to recognize the proofs of 
this in the Bible itself is to miss the deeper mean- 
ing of the sacred book. 

Its immediate purpose, of course, is to show 
God's method of preparing for the coming of his 
Eternal Son into our human nature, and accom- 
plishing the redeeming sacrifice of his death. To 
do this, a single race, the Jews, had to be chosen. 
Their training stretches through centuries; and 
it is from this specially chosen stock, after a 
training which has passed from stage to stage 
through more than two thousand years, that 

92 



THE BIBLE 

Christ came. But when the great Redeeming 
Sacrifice of the Cross was accomplished, what 
may be called the "race limitations" of the gospel 
ceased. The gospel had to its Jewish stock the 
relation that a flower has to the stem on which 
it is carried, but it comes to the world to-day not 
as a Jewish creed but as the creed of the human 
race. 

The world-wide sweep of the gospel finds dra- 
matic proof in the first Christian sermon ever 
preached, when "every man heard in his own 
tongue wherein he was born, Parthians and Medes 
and Elamites . . ." the catalogue runs on, till 
the wondering crowd — "strangers of Rome, Jews 
and proselytes, Cretes and Arabians" — cry to 
each other, "We do hear them speak in our own 
tongues the wonderful works of God." And Paul 
again and again in his Epistles strikes the uni- 
versal note. "In Christ," he says, "there is 
neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncir- 
cumcision, barbarian, Scythian, bond or free, but 
Christ is all in all." 

But in the Old Testament, too, there is — alas ! 
too long and often unrecognized — the universal 
note. The grace of God flows through the Jewish 
stock but is not confined to it. 

Modern criticism is apt to dismiss from con- 
sideration the books which bear the names of 
Ruth and Esther and Jonah. They seem irrele- 
vant; they bear no immediate relation to the 
Jewish story with its sublime and single purpose 
of producing the stock from which the Incarnate 
Son of God should spring. The book of Ruth, 
looked at from the literary standpoint, is an 
Eastern idyll, and poetry has gathered round the 

93 



WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 

figure of its heroine — a Moabitish girl — as she 
stands "knee deep amid the alien corn." In her 
nature, it is true, love, human love, took a high 
and noble form. "Entreat me not to leave thee," 
she says to her mother-in-law, "or to return from 
following after thee. Whither thou goest I will 
go . . . where thou diest I will die, and there 
will I be buried." But the all-significant note of 
this Moabitish girl's devotion is generally omitted, 
"Thy God shall be my God!" She left her 
heathen faith, her heathen kinsfolk, under the ac- 
tion of spiritual forces and for spiritual ends; 
and the book has its place in the Old Testament 
clearly designed to show that it was not from a 
purely Jewish stock that the Saviour of the race 
sprang; there was in it a strain of non- Jewish 
blood. The universal note is there ! 

So again the book of Esther seems to have no 
direct relation to the spiritual purposes for which 
the Jewish race was being trained. The name of 
God is not even mentioned in it. But the book is 
an Eastern drama in which we see evil and good 
struggling together. What a study we have in 
Haman of a nature given to evil ! On the side of 
evil are all the forces of the empire; and in the 
courage of the Jewish girl when she takes her life 
in her hands — "If I die, I die" on her lips to save 
her race — we see how in the providence of God evil 
is defeated and the nation is saved. And to this 
very day in every Jewish household the name and 
the deed of Esther are remembered and honored. 
It is a tiny picture showing how — outside the 
Jewish race — God works for the triumph of good 
and the defeat of evil. 

The book of Jonah, again, if we read it through 
94 



THE BIBLE 

the spectacles of the Higher Critics, is made in- 
credible and turned into a mere folk-story of a 
low type by the incident of Jonah and the whale. 
What relation has the book to the purpose for 
which the Jewish race was being trained? But 
as a mere study in the play of human and divine 
forces the story of Jonah is of immeasurable 
value; it goes to the very root of things. As an 
illustration of the action of divine forces outside 
the Jewish area what can be more striking? Here 
is one of the great cities of that age "wherein were 
more than six score thousand that cannot discern 
between their right hand and their left hand"; 
and also there is "much cattle." God sends his 
servant to this city with a call to repentance, the 
city repents and God averts its doom. 

And what a contrast the story offers between 
human and divine pity ! We see Jonah sitting to 
watch the doom of Nineveh accomplished, and 
ready to die of mere vexation because God's pity 
was so great — while it is God who remembers the 
"six score thousand" little children and "cattle." 
What a revelation of his character is given in the 
very process of a great judgment, as in God's 
care for the little ones and for the cattle. 

These three books, which some critics would 
thrust out of the Bible on the ground of their ir- 
relevance, are set there by God himself as an ex- 
ample of his way of dealing with non-Jewish 
races, even while that race was being trained with 
such care for its high office in the birth of Jesus 
Christ. And the revelation holds good still; this 
is still the office of the Bible — to bear witness to 
the blessed fact that the love of God for our race 
is co-extensive with the race. 

95 



BOOK III 
ON MIRACLES 



"If it can be shown that the proof alleged of all these 
[Christ's miracles] is absolutely none at all, then is revela- 
tion overturned." — Butler's Analogy. 



CHAPTER I 
"THE PREJUDICE OF CRITICISM" 

In his new book, Belief in God, Bishop Gore — 
who, it must be remembered, is himself a scholar 
of distinction and a Higher Critic in the sane 
sense of the term — has a chapter on what he calls 
"The Prejudice of Criticism." 

"For the last seventy years," he says, "the 
intellect of Europe as a whole — so far as it has 
paid attention to the origins of Christianity — has 
been occupied in substantially rewriting the gos- 
pels. It has been producing an historical Jesus 
markedly unlike the original in the gospels, or 
rather several discordant pictures all unlike the 
original in many most important respects. Now 
when we set ourselves to examine the cause of 
this undoubted fact I think we shall find it to be 
that the intellect of Europe has been m rebellion 
against the miraculous, and generally, the super- 
natural, of which the gospels are confessedly 
full." That "prejudice against the supernatural 
and the miraculous" — a vast presupposition, a 
theory accepted as a fact without being proved 
that such events cannot really have occurred — 
has made necessary, Bishop Gore tells us, "that 
radical reconstruction of the historical Jesus 
which we witness"; and that is certainly and 
visibly true. 

The widespread objection to the miraculous 
99 



WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 

element in Christianity springs from the theory 
of evolution, which Darwin first — in an imperfect 
way — recognized and which at once appealed to 
the reason, satisfied the science, and captured the 
imagination, of the world. Everything, it was 
argued, must now be interpreted in its terms and 
made to fit in with its laws. It seemed to show 
that the universe itself was governed by general 
laws which left no room for such an interruption 
as a "miracle," and the impact of evolution on 
religion for the moment was profound. In the 
later and wiser reading of evolution it is clear, of 
course, that it has no necessary quarrel with reli- 
gion. It is not inevitably and necessarily athe- 
istic. It undertakes not to prove that the world 
has no Maker but only to discover the method on 
which it is made; and certainly evolution as it is 
now understood gives ample room for the miracu- 
lous, and this for two reasons. 

First, evolution, so far from making miracles 
incredible, is itself on any reading the greatest 
of miracles. The original germ, which contained 
all things, and from which all things have evolved, 
cannot have evolved itself. God must come into 
the process somewhere, even if only at the begin- 
ning and with a single creative act. And the part 
that God plays in the making of things by this 
theory is not minimized; it is infinitely magnified ! 
For what a miracle above all miracles must have 
been the act — and the moment— when into a soli- 
tary germ God packed the whole physical uni- 
verse, with all its forces, its myriad forms of life; 
packed into it all history, all art, all religion, all 
literature, all crimes, and all virtues; the brain 
of Plato and of Shakespeare, the heroism of the 

100 



ON MIRACLES 

saints, the fury of their persecutors ! It is 
surely a greater strain, both on the imagination 
and the reason, to believe in that lonely, all-in- 
cluding, and original germ — into which a uni- 
verse was packed — than is required by the narrow- 
est and most literal reading of the first chapters 
of Genesis. 

But further, it is clear that the physical uni- 
verse, even though it is governed by the laws of 
evolution, visibly leaves room in its order for the 
play of human will. And is God less than man? Has 
he given to his creature a larger freedom within 
the circle of physical laws than he himself has? 

It is, of course, an idle business to discuss the 
question of miracles with an opponent who denies 
the existence of a personal God. An atheist pure 
and simple belongs to an intellectual realm remote 
from reason, and requires quite special contro- 
versial treatment. But granted the existence of 
a personal God, having the moral qualities — but 
in perfect and infinite measure — that we possess, 
then an immense moral presumption in favor of 
the occurrence of miracles is instantly created. 
Our own relation to Nature as intelligent agents 
carries with it the power to put natural forces 
into new conjunctions, and so to produce results 
which to Nature itself are impossible; and this 
makes results outside the range of natural laws 
themselves credible. And why should not God 
be able to do in the vast sphere of the universe 
what we can do in the tiny sphere of our lives? 

Now it is the deepest — though sometimes the 
speechless and unconscious — longing of human 
nature to know God on the moral side of his char- 
acter; and even if God be no better than good 

101 



WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 

men, he must desire to make exactly that moral 
revelation of himself to his creatures. Would 
he kindle that divine longing in us only to mock 
it? 

The visible law of even the physical universe is 
that no organ is left without an element which 
corresponds to it. Is it credible that God would 
have given us eyes and then set us in a world 
without light? Is it credible that he would have 
given us lungs and then set us in a world without 
an atmosphere? A world constructed on such 
principles would be the creation of a mocking 
devil ! God's world certainly is not built on that 
plan! Now the faculty in our nature that has 
the deepest root and the widest range is the 
faculty, in some degree at least, of knowing God # ; 
and with the capacity for that great experience 
comes the need for it ; it determines that our hap- 
piness lies in it. If the satisfaction of that 
faculty is an impossibility, our existence is a 
failure. But will God, who planted that deep 
instinct in our nature, mock it by withholding 
from us the knowledge of which he has made us 
capable, and on which, by his own law, our hap- 
piness hangs? To give us the capacity for know- 
ing God, to put in our deepest nature an un- 
quenchable longing for that knowledge and then 
to make no provision for such a knowledge to 
reach us were a worse crime than to give us eyes 
and then to bid us live in a world without light. 
What a slander that would be on God ! 

But how shall God give us that knowledge? 
How can he reach men? But God so made men 
that their lives can be touched to finest issues by 
his realized presence. Only by entering into rela- 

103 



ON MIRACLES 

tions with them on another plane than that of 
which we call "natural law" — by exhibiting him- 
self in regard to them, in a course of conduct 
above the purely physical realm — only so his 
creatures will learn to know God as a moral Be- 
ing. Only so they will receive the stimulus they 
need; so, and only so, will the Creator fulfill 
toward man that purpose for which alone we 
can conceive that he created him. But if that be 
the case, then it is only by miracle that he can do 
so. And the justification of miracles is the fact 
that they are part of a scheme by which God 
brings himself within reach of our limited facul- 
ties and makes the knowledge of himself possible 
to us. This constitutes that overwhelming pre- 
sumption in favor of the occurrence of miracles 
which the critics of the Christian faith, from 
Hume to Huxley, ignore. 

Matthew Arnold discusses the incident of a pen 
suddenly becoming a penwiper and Professor 
Huxley takes the illustration of a centaur dis- 
covered walking down Fleet Street as fair ex- 
amples of possible miracles. Professor Huxley 
declares that "nothing short of a careful mono- 
graph by a highly competent investigator, ac- 
companied by figures and measurements," could 
convince him about the centaur ! But this miracu- 
lous penwiper or centaur has no moral pre justi- 
fication or use; whereas the Christian miracles 
are not so much the guarantee and evidence of a 
revelation ; they are a revelation itself — the revela- 
tion which it is the highest moral necessity on the 
part of God to make, and the deepest spiritual 
need on the part of the man to receive. 

It may be remembered that in that now almost 
103 



WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 

forgotten book, Robert Elesmere, it was claimed 
to be proved beyond doubt that miracles do not 
happen. To this Andrew Lang replied : "Miracles 
do not happen? Then it is a miracle if they do 
not" — an epigram keen-edged and true, for, as 
Scott Holland, quoting Lang's epigram, said, 
their not happening would mean this — that there 
exists a loving God who has made creatures whose 
highest power is love and compassion for beings 
like themselves, and though they toil along in 
agony and darkness, endeavoring to realize that 
which is highest in them potentially, he never 
reaches forth a helping hand, never speaks that 
word which it so overawed Browning's Arabian 
physician even to think possible: 

"Oh, heart I made, a heart beats here, 
Face my hands fashioned, see it in myself; 
Thou hast no power, nor may'st conceive of mine. 
But love I gave thee, with myself to love, 
And thou must love me, who have died for thee." 

That God does not make such a revelation of 
himself to his creatures seems a very incredible 
proposition, and the claim of the Bible is that this 
incredible thing is not true. 

It may be added that it is possible to argue, 
with resistless force, that miracles are not only 
authenticated by a great forerunning moral pre- 
sumption, they are justified by their visible re- 
sults in history. From the miracles of Scripture 
there does, as a matter of fact, stream a luminous 
moral glory in which the face of God is revealed 
as Nature, though all her majestic processes can- 
not reveal him. 

Butler, the author of the famous Analogy, the 
104 



ON MIRACLES 

sanest and keenest brain ever employed in English 
literature on the greatest subjects of religion, saw 
with clear and sure vision that the Christian faith 
itself, which rests on miracles and is attested by 
miracles, stands or falls by the credibility of the 
miracles it records. 

The trouble of the moment for us — and since 
truth abides the trouble is only for the moment — 
is that so many of the professed teachers of the 
Christian faith regard miracles as the excrescences 
and the burdens of the Christian system ; and they 
try the experiment of making faith in Christian- 
ity easier by the process of attenuating or jetti- 
soning its miracles ! They might as well propose 
to improve the seagoing capabilities of a ship by 
jettisoning its compass and chart and sails! And 
it is worth while here reprinting Butler's weighty 
and solemn warning that the Christian faith, 
which rests on miracles and is attested by mir- 
acles, stands or falls by the credibility of the mir- 
acle records. 

"The only question," he says, "concerning the 
truth of Christianity is whether it be a real reve- 
lation, not whether it be attended with every cir- 
cumstance which we should have looked for; and 
concerning the authority of Scripture, whether 
it be what it claims to be, not whether it be a 
book of such sort, and so promulgated, as weak 
men are apt to fancy a book containing a divine 
revelation should. No objections can overthrow 
such a kind of revelation as the Christian claims 
to be, since there are no objections against the 
morality of it, but such as can show that there is 
no proof of miracles wrought originally in attes- 
tation of it; no appearance of anything miracu- 

105 



WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 

loug in its obtaining in the world; nor any of 
prophecy — that is, of events foretold which hu- 
man sagacity could not foresee. If it can be 
shown that the proof alleged for all these is ab- 
solutely none at all, then is revelation over- 
turned" 



106 



CHAPTER II 

THREE POSSIBLE ALTERNATIVES 

There are only three possible alternatives to 
a belief in the miraculous as an element in the 
Christian faith: (1) The absolute rejection of the 
possibility of miracles; this is practically the 
Germans position. "The exclusion of miracles 
from our view of history," says Schweitzer, "has 
been universally recognized as a principle of criti- 
cism" (Gore, p. 219). "In the Person and acts of 
Jesus," says Strauss, "no supernaturalism should 
be allowed to venture." Renan, in Vie de Jesus. 
follows the Germans; "people who are in accord 
with positive science," he says, "do not admit 
the supernatural, the miracle." The universe is a 
system of Law, and God — if he exists — is im- 
prisoned in his own laws. Man, his creature, it is 
true, is a free agent and the laws of Nature for 
him are visibly tools which he can use to produce 
results which would be impossible to the laws of 
Nature if left to themselves. Could "the laws of 
Nature," if left to themselves, produce a watch 
or run a train? The theory that miracles are im- 
possible assumes that God has less power over 
his own laws than man, his creature, has. He can- 
not, or will not, use those laws as the servant of 
his personal will as his creature man does and 
use them to produce results of which those laws 
themselves are incapable. 

107 



WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 

The second alternative to a belief in the miracu- 
lous is to accept the possibility of miracles as a 
theory but to deny their actual existence as a 
fact. Thus Kuenen, in his own words, "while 
placing in the forefront of historical criticism the 
theory that miracles are possible," yet declares 
"his conviction that there is not one single miracle 
on record which we could accept as a fact." This 
is an ingenious — or rather a disingenious — eva- 
sion of the whole question. 

The third method, and one that is more plaus- 
ible, is that of Schleiermacher. He expended in- 
finite labor and skill in exhausting the miracles 
of the New Testament of all "miraculous" char- 
acter and he showed equal ingenuity in impart- 
ing a natural aspect to what survived. His liter- 
ary skill made his method popular but the prac- 
tical effect on his own students was, as one critic 
puts it, to send them in one or other of two quite 
opposite directions — upwards toward a stronger 
and more honest faith than that of their teacher 
or "downwards into the depths of theological 
negation." Schleiermacher, in a word, had no 
disciples who remained loyal to his teaching; the 
foothold he gave them was too narrow. 

Now it may be well at this stage, if only by 
way of clearing the ground, to deal with the first 
of these three possible alternatives to a belief 
in the miraculous, the peremptory and absolute 
dismissal of miracles from the whole realm of reli- 
gion, and the construction of a non-miraculous 
form of the Christian faith. In Germany for 
nearly a century the strongest — if not the keen- 
est and quickest — brains ever applied to theology 
were used ;with the plodding and heavy-footed 

108 



ON MIRACLES 

industry characteristic of German work to evolve 
and make credible an absolutely non-miraculous 
form of Christian faith. They failed — failed ab- 
solutely — and the story of their failure is told 
with great clearness and insight and with deep 
and unconscious pathos by one who is himself a 
distinguished German scholar, Albert Schweitzer, 
in his well-known book, The Quest of the His- 
torical Jesus. 

The list of learned names stretches from 
Reimarus, who died in 1768, to such names as 
Wrede (1901) and Pfleiderer (1902), a proces- 
sion of great scholars, laboriously evolving in- 
genious theories to take the place of the historic 
Gospel, theories which came like shadows and 
went like shadows. And the spectacle is a tragedy 
almost without parallel in literary history — a 
tragedy of learned brains beating the wind with 
infinite toil, or sowing with profitless industry the 
sand, or doing whatever serves as the most perfect 
symbol of wasted effort. Schweitzer himself says 
that "the greatest achievement of German theol- 
ogy is the critical investigation of the life of 
Jesus. It is the most tremendous thing which the 
[German] religious consciousness has ever dared 
and done and it is a failure, a failure cruel alike 
in its thoroughness and its cost." 

"The critical study of the life of Jesus," he 
adds, "has been for theology a school of honesty. 
The world has never seen before, and will never 
see again, a struggle for truth so full of pain 
and renunciation as that of which the Lives of 
Jesus of the last hundred years contain the 
cryptic record" (p. 5). Schweitzer himself says 
that as he contemplates the task of describing 

109 



WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 

the toil of German theologians to purge the Chris- 
tian faith of the miraculous, he finds himself con- 
fronted with "a scene of the most boundless con- 
fusion." "A series of experiments are repeated 
with constant varying modifications suggested by 
the results furnished by the subsidiary sciences. 
Most of the writers, however, have no suspicion 
that they are merely repeating an experiment 
which has often been made before. Some of them 
discover this in the course of their work to their 
own great astonishment.' 5 

Toward the close of his book Schweitzer makes 
for himself and for German scholars generally a 
frank confession. "We thought," he says, "that 
we could build up by the increase of historical 
knowledge a new and vigorous Christianity. . . . 
We thought that it was for us to lead our time 
by a round-about way through the historical 
Jesus in order to bring it to the Jesus who is a 
spiritual power in the present. . . . We have 
made Jesus hold another language with our time 
from that which he really held. In the process 
we ourselves have been enfeebled, and have robbed 
our own thoughts of their vigor. ... It is noth- 
ing less than a misfortune for modern theology 
that it mixes history with everything, and ends 
by being proud of the skill with which it finds 
its own thoughts, even to its beggarly pseudo- 
metaphysic with which it has banished genuine 
speculative metaphysic from the sphere of reli- 
gion in Jesus, and represents him as expressing 
them" (p. 398). 

We take three of the names in this tragedy of 
wasted toil, Reimarus, Strauss, and Baur. In 
point of scholarship, of literary genius, and of 

110 



ON MIRACLES 

intellectual power, they are the three most arrest- 
ing figures in what is, in effect, a gallery of 
theological failures. 

Schweitzer finds no praise too high for the 
literary skill of Reimarus. Of his book, The Aims 
of Jesus and His Disciples, he says, "It is a mag- 
nificent piece of work, one of the greatest events 
in the history of criticism, a masterpiece of gen- 
eral literature." Its aim was to "reconstruct" 
Christ himself, as well as his history, on non- 
miraculous lines. And curiously enough, the in- 
spiration of Reimarus 9 great book was Hate — 
hate not so much of the Person of Christ, but of 
the miraculous element in him. And Hate as well 
as Love, Schweitzer tells us, can write a Life of 
Jesus ; and the greatest of them are written with 
hate — that of Reimarus and that of David 
Friedrich Strauss. They were eager to picture 
Christ as truly and purely human, to strip from 
him the robes of splendor with which he had been 
appareled, and to clothe him once more with the 
"coarse garments in which he had walked in Gali- 
lee" (p. 5). A study of the Life of Jesus through 
the spectacles of Hate must have been a very 
strange experience. Wit is not the usual char- 
acteristic of the German mind but Reimarus 
had that gift and his hate gave it a sharp 
edge. 

His book, when published, found a wide circle 
of readers but with all its brilliancy it failed. 
But it is significant to note that what may be 
called the theological mind of Germany, not to 
say the general trend of public opinion as far as 
it was capable of forming an opinion on theo- 
logical subjects, was wholly against the new ver- 

111 



WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 

sion of Christianity which Reimarus invented and 
Strauss adopted. Reimarus himself was con- 
scious of this, and his chief work, The Aims of 
Jesus and His Disciples, remained unpublished 
until after his death. Strauss, too, knew that his 
theology was unpopular. His Life of Jesus was 
published when he was a young man about twenty- 
seven, and in a sense it was his professional ruin. 
"I might well bear a grudge against my book," 
he wrote twenty-five years later, "for it has done 
much evil. It has excluded me from free public 
teaching, in which I took a pleasure. It has torn 
me from natural relationships and drawn me into 
unnatural ones ; it has made my life a lonely one." 
And yet he claimed that writing and publishing 
his book "had preserved the inward health of his 
mind and heart." 

Both these writers, however, have seriously in- 
fluenced German theology in at least one, and that 
an evil, direction. They helped to destroy the 
divine atmosphere that hitherto had gathered 
round the Figure of Christ in the early history of 
Christianity. They gave every German theo- 
logian a new courage in distorting the history of 
the Christian faith into the pattern of his own 
ideas. Other scholars adopted the methods of 
Reimarus and of Strauss, even though they used 
them to produce results different from theirs. 
The influence of Strauss in this respect was per- 
haps even more deadly than that of Reimarus. 
Schweitzer himself says, "The critical study of 
the Life of Jesus by German theologians falls into 
two periods, that before Strauss and that after 
Strauss"; and since their day the theory that 
miracles must be dismissed as myths from the his- 

112 



ON MIRACLES 

tory of the birth of Christianity has become 
almost a platitude in German theology. 

F. C. Baur lacked the literary brilliancy of 
Reimarus and he had not, perhaps, the personal 
force of Strauss, but in scholarship he was at 
least their equal and in some qualities of personal 
character he was far beyond them. He had con- 
science, and when in 1826 he was called to the 
Chair of Historical Theology in Tubingen he hesi- 
tated to take it, counting himself too young for 
that great post. He had an intensity of industry 
rare even in German scholars. He rose at 4 a. m. 
throughout the whole year, filling a long day with 
toil, and as a sign of his kindly temper, in winter 
mornings when the ink in his ink-bottle was frozen 
he would have no fire kindled, out of consideration 
for his servants. His scheme of theology had a 
broader base than that of his predecessors; it 
rested on two great — and quite unproved — as- 
sumptions. (1) That the element of the miracu- 
lous in Christianity was a fiction: (2) a theory 
which he borrowed from Hegel, that human 
thought moves in a perpetually recurring and 
triple rhythm of affirmation, negation, and syn- 
thesis of opposites. This triple rhythm Baur 
taught held good in theology, in history, and 
through the whole universe. On this reading 
early Christian history took the form of a con- 
flict between the Jewish element represented by 
Peter and what may be called the Greek element 
represented by Paul. This imaginary rhythm of 
conflict and conciliation, in the course of a cen- 
tury found its synthesis, strange to say, in the 
Roman Catholic Church of the second century. 
Baur redistributed the events and dates of the 

113 



WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 

gospels to suit this theory and in the whole his- 
tory of German theology no other theory won a 
fame so sudden, so wide and it must be added so 
brief. His theory was found to be in conflict 
with the plain text of the gospels and with the 
very almanac of the story and of the literature 
of the gospels and fell into almost universal dis- 
repute. 

Here, then, were three brilliant and command- 
ing figures in German literature. No other names 
in the whole stretch of a century can compare 
with these for scholarship, for brilliancy of in- 
tellectual powers. But they failed; they created 
no school, they evolved no reading of the Chris- 
tian faith which survives, they had no successors. 
No doubt they set an example — quantum valeat 
— of a courage without precedent in dissecting 
the gospels, in reading strange meanings into 
them, and tearing accepted old truths out of 
them ; and smaller men follow their example. But 
their particular theories died with them. There 
has never since been such a concentration of 
scholarship so high, of a recklessness of specula- 
tion so courageous, as that they expended in the 
attempt to create a form of Christianity ex- 
hausted of the miraculous element; but they left 
no heirs to their theories, and where Reimarus, 
Strauss, and Baur failed smaller men will cer- 
tainly not succeed. Schweitzer himself closes his 
story of the quest of the historical Jesus with 
the words, "Those who are fond of talking about 
negative theology can find their account here. 
There is nothing more negative than the result 
of the critical study of the life of Jesus." Then 
he describes how the real historical Christ re- 

114 



ON MIRACLES 

turns: "He came to us as One unknown, without 
a name, as of old, by the lake side, he came to 
those men who knew him not. He speaks to us 
the same word: 'Follow thou me!' and sets us to 
the tasks which he has to fulfill for one time. 
He commands. And to those who obey him, 
whether they be wise or simple, he will reveal him- 
self in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which 
they shall pass through in his fellowship, and as 
an ineffable mystery they shall learn in their own 
experience who he is." 



115 



CHAPTER III 

THE MIRACLES OF THE NEW TESTA- 
MENT 

As we have shown elsewhere there are only two 
intelligible positions in regard to miracles; first, 
that taken by most German scholars — that mir- 
acles are impossible, they have no place in the 
system of things, and should have none in the 
Bible. German theologians, it will be seen, allow 
God to create his world, and then they dismiss 
him from it. His place as a force in human 
affairs is taken by the laws of Nature — an iron 
succession of events in which pity has no room 
and prayer no office. It is a theory which limits 
the authority of God and leaves at least one half 
the Bible without any meaning. For in the actual 
Bible which God in his providence has given us, 
what a place, large and high, is given to miracles ! 
The Incarnation itself is the greatest of miracles 
and makes all others credible. 

As Christian faith interprets them, miracles 
represent one form of God's activities, one way in 
which his personal will expresses itself. What we 
call the "laws of Nature" are another form. 
"Law, 55 says Newman, "is not a cause but a fact. 
When we come to the question of cause, then we 
have no experience of any cause but will, 55 and 
throughout the universe it is the will of God that 
acts. The notion of "natural laws 55 as independ- 

116 



ON MIRACLES 

ent categories of imperative force may certainly 
be dismissed as unscientific, not to say absurd. 
Newman was a theologian, but a famous scientist 
practically agrees with him, though he uses other 
terms. 

"A law of Nature in the scientific sense," says 
Huxley, "is the product of a mental operation 
upon the facts of Nature which come under our 
observation and has no more existence outside the 
mind than color has." 

And beside Huxley may be placed a more 
modern but almost equally great scientist. 
"Look," says Sir Oliver Lodge, "for the action 
of the Deity, if at all, then always ; not in the past 
alone, not only in the future, but equally in the 
present. If his action is not visible now it never 
will be, and never has been visible." It is clear 
that granted the personal mind of the Creator in 
his own creation miracles are possible. "Once 
admit of God," says J. S. Mill, "and the produc- 
tion of an effect by his direct volition must be 
reckoned with as a serious possibility." 

The whole drift of modern thought to-day, in 
brief, is running in the direction of the recogni- 
tion of miracles. We have only to realize, indeed, 
the actual place that we ourselves have in the 
realm of natural laws to realize the credibility of 
miracles. "Every action of the human free will," 
says Lord Kelvin, "is a miracle to physical and 
chemical and mathematical science." And can 
we imagine that to his creature, man, God has 
given a power to use the laws of Nature as tools 
for giving effect to his will, and has himself no 
such power? The miracles of the New Testament, 
it may be added, are made credible by their con- 

117 



WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 

text, they form part of a great history which 
attests them and which is unintelligible without 
them. Their context is the whole redemptive 
scheme of Christianity ; they are, on the Christian 
theory, incidents in the life of a supernatural 
Teacher and Saviour. Granted that there broke 
in on human history — a history disordered by 
sin — the figure of a divine Person, himself com- 
pletely out of the "natural" order, it was inevi- 
table that this sudden emergence of the super- 
natural would register itself at a hundred points 
in supernatural events. 

And Christ's miracles of pity have for us — who 
did not see them, but only read of them — a gra- 
cious and divine office. They are far-running 
prophecies, prophecies of the time when Christ's 
gospel having accomplished its end there shall be 
no more curse; God shall wipe away all tears 
from weeping eyes ; there shall be no more death, 
neither sorrow nor crying, neither shall there be 
any more pain. How much of hope would slip 
from the pages of the Bible if Christ's miracles 
were to be dismissed as forgeries or mistakes ! 

Now between these two positions there stands 
a third, which has neither the courage of the 
German position nor the faith of what may be 
called the Christian position. It does not bluntly 
dismiss miracles, nor yet does it frankly accept 
them, but it has a settled and visible bias against 
miracles — a bias which is not always avowed, but 
clearly exists. Miracles are dismissed from his- 
tory on any excuse — the want of agreement in 
the accounts given, or a look of strangeness in 
the details. Great ingenuity is displayed in re- 
ducing the number of miracles and equal ingenuity 

118 






ON MIRACLES 

is displayed in robbing any which survive of their 
"miraculous" character. This is the almost uni- 
versal treatment of the miraculous in the litera- 
ture of the British Higher Criticism and it is one 
of the points at which it fails. 

Its eagerness to reduce the miraculous element 
in the gospels is an inheritance from the evolu- 
tion theory ; yet the popular discredit of miracles 
which was one of the early results of Darwin's 
theory has almost wholly passed away. The 
theory of evolution itself as it is now modified 
finds a place for miracles, and the common sense 
of the world realizes that no reading of the facts 
of nature and of the divine method on which 
the world is governed can blot out the possibility 
of miracles. The area of natural law within 
which man is using these laws as tools, bending 
them to purposes beyond their own reach, widens 
every day; and as we have said, what is true of 
man must be in a yet larger sense true of God. 

It would be easy to multiply examples of the 
unscientific attitude towards miracles which it is 
claimed on "scientific" grounds the Higher Criti- 
cism adopts. Dr. Sanday is in some respects one 
of the sanest of the Higher Critics, and his plan 
was not to deny the incident which required a 
miracle for its explanation but to invent some 
method of "explaining" it on non-miraculous 
grounds. As an example of his method of ex- 
hausting Christ's miracles of any miraculous 
quality his treatment of the feeding of the four 
thousand may be taken. Christ, he says, did feed 
that multitude with that handful of bread; but 
he explains, it was in the manner in which those 
who partake of the Lord's Supper are fed — each 

119 



WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 

of the four thousand received a crumb. It was a 
quasi-sacramental meal. There was no miracle; 
none was needed! That "explanation" is deli- 
riously simple, but what a very simple mind one 
must have who accepts it! 

Later examples of this method of disposing of 
miracles are supplied by the article on "The Life 
and Teaching of Jesus" in Peake's Commentary, 
by Mr. H. G. Wood, M.A. He sets out by warn- 
ing his readers that "suspicion and doubt of vari- 
ous kinds and degrees attach to many of the 
stories of miracles in the New Testament," a 
sentence which serves to cast a veil of darkness 
and uncertainty over nearly the whole area of 
Christ's miracles. Mr. Wood then proceeds to 
give examples of the miracles on which lie "sus- 
picion and doubt of various kinds and degrees." 
He takes a cluster of miracles almost at hap- 
hazard, ranging from the withering of the fig-tree 
up to the raising of Lazarus, and dismisses them 
all in three brief sentences ! 

We "may reject the withering of the fig-tree," 
we are told, "because such a miracle of destruc- 
tion seems to us unlike Jesus" ; or because it 
"seems to be an instance in which a miracle has 
grown out of a parable." The incredible miracle 
has its birth in an unknown parable! The story 
of the coin in the fish's mouth we are encouraged 
to reject because "the basis of the story is a folk- 
lore motive." That is the very thing to be 
proved, and it is taken for granted! It will be 
observed that these miracles are not indicted and 
dismissed for reasons of scholarship; there is 
nothing in the original record which makes their 
story incredible. Mr. Wood asks us to doubt 

120 



ON MIRACLES 

them because, in substance, they are not the kind 
of miracles or are not reached by methods of 
which Mr- Wood himself approves. For Mr. 
Wood begins his study of the miracles with a 
presupposition of the kind of miracles which Jesus 
might be expected to perform; of the manner 
which it seemed probable he would adopt; and 
he rejects those miracles which do not fit in with 
his own presuppositions. 

We are thus advised to "hesitate" in our ac- 
ceptance of the raising of Lazarus as "history," 
and for a reason so simple that it can be expressed 
in six words — "the strange silence of the Synop- 
tists." Now the raising of Lazarus marks one 
of the great and critical moments in the life of 
Christ himself and hardly any other incident has 
made so deep an impression on history. It was 
the incident that brought the hate of the scribes 
to a climax against Jesus and hastened his cruci- 
fixion. If the story was an invention half — if 
not the whole of — the population of Jerusalem 
must have known it to be a lie. What is it which 
should make us willing to surrender the whole 
story of how Jesus wept, and the great words, "I 
am the resurrection and the life," which we all 
hope will be read over our own graves? Mr. H. 
G. Wood wants us to surrender one of the most 
sacred incidents in the life of Christ on account 
of "the strange silence of the Synoptists." In 
Mr. Wood's opinion the story of the raising of 
Lazarus ought to have been told in the four gos- 
pels, and as the Synoptists do not share that view 
the miracle itself becomes incredible! This can 
hardly be described as sane criticism. 

Perhaps the most sacred and miraculous inci- 
121 



WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 

dent in the story of the incarnation is the virgin 
birth of Christ, and Mr. H. G. Wood dismisses 
this at once, and peremptorily, into space. "It 
is no longer possible," he says, "to insist on the 
literal accuracy of the gospel incidents, and this 
is particularly true of the story of the virgm birth 
and of the resurrection." The reader is entitled 
to ask, "What is the cruel but irresistible logic 
that compels us to dismiss not only the story of 
the virgin birth but of the resurrection of Jesus 
Christ from the place they have held for over two 
thousand years in the faith of Christian people?" 
Mr. Wood's explanation has at least the merit of 
an almost childlike, not to say childish, simplicity. 
"As regards the birth stories in Matthew and 
Luke, 55 Principal E. Griffith-Jones says, "we find 
ourselves in doubt on many points, and there is 
reason to believe that a reverent imagination has 
been at work on traditional material" (p. 15). 

With great politeness and with a couple of 
soft and evasive phrases the great story of the 
virgin birth of Christ is thus dissolved into vapor. 
Principal Griffith-Jones is not rude enough to say 
that the whole story is a myth or that the wit- 
nesses to it lie. There was, he admits, some "ma- 
terial 55 at the basis of the story but it was only of 
a "traditional 55 — that is, a non-historic — char- 
acter. The human imagination had worked on 
that tradition but it was a "reverent 55 imagina- 
tion and under its action the story had become a 
myth. 

The adjective in the quotation here given is un- 
fortunate, for if the story is purely a work of im- 
agination that imagination can hardly have been 
of a "reverent 55 character, as its product is a 

122 



ON MIRACLES 

tissue of falsehoods. The incident of the angel, 
for example, who appeared to Mary with the 
greeting, "Hail thou that art highly favored. The 
Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among 
women" ; and Mary's answer, "Behold the hand- 
maid of the Lord. Be it unto me according to 
thy word," are pure inventions. But in effect, 
Principal Griffith-Jones, to put it bluntly, says 
the story of the virgin birth is a lie, though he 
wraps up the lie in a mist of soft phrases. 

But beside the slightness of the reason urged 
for rejecting the story of the virgin birth let us 
set the scale and significance of the event itself. 
It is of priceless value to the Christian faith. 
Two evangelists out of the four tell the story at 
length. It forms part of the oldest of all the 
Christian creeds, the Apostles' Creed. If it has 
to be dismissed as a flight of imagination we must 
tear out half of the first chapter in Matthew's 
Gospel and two thirds of the first chapter in that 
of Luke. In place of the exquisite figure of Mary, 
"Blessed art thou among women," with that burst 
of divine poetry — a New Testament psalm — "My 
soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath 
rejoiced in God, my Saviour. For he hath re- 
garded the low estate of his handmaiden; for, 
behold, from henceforth, all generations shall call 
me blessed" — in all this we are asked to see an 
unchaste woman, who was with child before she 
was a wife; and Jesus Christ, on this reading, 
came into our world through the gate of lust — 
a horrible suggestion ! 

Principal Griffith- Jones, to do him justice, does 
produce one tiny argument of a more practical 
kind. The story of the virgin birth, he says, is 

123 



WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 

incredible because "it is impossible to harmonize 
the various versions." We are assured, in addi- 
tion, that this impossibility of "harmonizing the 
various stories" is equally true, and even particu- 
larly true, of the resurrection of Jesus Christ! 
The logic which would deny the chastity of the 
mother of our Lord thus is equally valid to seal 
the grave of Jesus Christ. And a phrase of only 
eight words accomplishes all this! We are not 
asked to challenge the scholarship of these critics 
or to disprove their reading of difficult passages 
in some ancient document. We are required to 
mutilate the New Testament, to cut out one of 
the articles of the Apostles' Creed, to let go a 
history so sacred and beautiful and so vital ta 
Christian faith, because Principal Griffith-Jones 
thinks it is impossible to "harmonize the various 
versions" ! 

But at this point critic refutes critic. Sanday, 
himself a Higher Critic of great authority, says 
of the two versions of the virgin birth that "they 
are, fundamentally, quite independent of each 
other ; but each, in a strange way, supplements the 
other." He adds that "the belief in the virgin 
birth is firmly established in the oldest form of 
the Apostles' Creed, and this fixed place, once 
gained, has never been lost." "The two versions," 
which Peake's Commentary assures us contradict 
each other and make the virgin birth incredible, 
in the judgment of Sanday "point back to an 
original kernel of fact, and were designed by God 
to enter into the providential order of history" 
(Miracle, p. 15). It is thus seen that a Higher 
Critic of greater authority than any one of the 
sixty-four writers in Peake's Commentary firmly 

124 



ON MIRACLES 

holds to the truth of the virgin birth of Christ 
which some of them, at least, deny. 

The true motive of the critics is the desire to 
attenuate the miraculous element in the Christian 
story ; but they cannot do this without tearing the 
Bible itself into rags. For the miraculous is 
woven into every fiber of Christ's story. The 
biggest miracle of all is the entrance into human 
life, into human form, of the eternal Son of God, 
and that makes possible all smaller miracles 
attending it, such as the sinless manner of Christ's 
birth. 



125 



CHAPTER IV 

THE GREATEST— AND THE MOST FOR- 
GOTTEN—MIRACLE OF CHRISTIAN 
HISTORY 

One of the greatest miracles of history is the 
Christian church; it followed the resurrection of 
Jesus Christ, but took a form that was quite un- 
expected. The Christ of the cross, with nailed 
hands and feet, the mockery of a crown on his 
forehead, with not a follower left, the might and 
authority of Rome arrayed against him, the 
Jewish Sanhedrin watching that crushed and 
desolate figure with eyes of triumphant hate — 
was there ever such a spectacle of defeat! He 
was left without a follower. Socrates sat among 
a group of devoted followers as he drank the hem- 
lock; Christ had on either side of him a cruci- 
fied thief, and from one of these alone — when all 
his disciples had fled — there came a word of faith. 

The grave in which his torn body lay was 
sealed with the authority of Rome and Roman 
soldiers kept guard over it. And yet neither the 
power of death nor the armed strength of Rome 
nor the hate of the Jewish Sanhedrin could keep 
that grave sealed. Life came back to the torn 
body, the seal of Rome on the tomb was broken, 
and the risen Christ came out victorious over 
death, with every sign of shame and hate effaced. 

126 



ON MIRACLES 

Now it is easy to imagine a use being made of 
Christ's resurrection which would have startled 
the world, proclaimed the defeat of his enemies, 
and have given him an immediate triumph. Sup- 
pose, for example, that stepping from the broken 
door of that tomb he had called his disciples 
about him and ridden in open triumph through 
the streets of Jerusalem, unhurt from the wounds 
of the cross and in visible triumph over death. 
How the spectacle would have startled the world ! 
What wondering crowds would have followed him, 
strewing flowers before his path ; as he came once 
more to the descent of the Mount of Olives how 
the multitudes would have cast their garments on 
the road before him, and with what deeper tumult 
of rejoicing voices the chant would have been 
raised: "Blessed be the King that cometh in the 
name of the Lord." The cross to which he was 
nailed represented the authority of Rome; and 
what a national triumph it would have seemed — 
what a defeat over Rome — to see Christ, unhurt 
by death, riding in kingly state through the 
streets of Jerusalem! The spectacle would have 
set the Jewish imagination on fire; it would have 
been accepted as a sign of victory over the Roman 
legions ; it would have left the hate of the Sanhe- 
drin powerless and defeated. 

Why was not an immediate and public use made 
of the resurrection of Jesus Christ? It was an 
event which would have startled the whole im- 
agination of the world. No other part in the 
story of Jesus Christ is so charged with wonder 
and mystery as the days which followed after he 
stepped unhurt from the tomb, and yet about no 
other part of Christ's story is so little told as 

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WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 

about the forty days between his resurrection 
and his ascension. The reason is that his resur- 
rection, if turned into a public spectacle, might 
have achieved a political victory for the Jewish 
nation, but it would have defeated the very pur- 
pose of the broken grave. Its objective was some- 
thing infinitely greater than anything in the realm 
of politics — a spiritual victory which was to 
change the whole history of the world ; and plainly 
the spiritual meaning of the resurrection was first 
to be explained to the faith and set on fire the 
imagination of Christ's followers. 

So Christ did not go back to the familiar com- 
panionships of his earthly ministry; a veil Is 
drawn over the state of Jesus Christ during those 
forty days. He had not yet ascended into heaven, 
and we are left to wonder whether hosts of angels 
unseen by human eyes hovered round him. There 
are some things beyond the reach of the human 
imagination and about which no questions can be 
asked. 

Christ first appeared to selected followers at 
intervals: then he called them from the tumult 
of Jerusalem to the quiet of Galilee. "Go, tell 
my brethren," he said, "that they go into Galilee, 
and there shall they see me." But we get only 
glimpses of what took place even at Galilee. 
How natural it is to long for a full report of his 
words when as victor over the cross and the grave 
he "spoke to them of the things pertaining to the 
kingdom of God"! It is clear that even in the 
profound emotions of those great events the 
obstinate Jewish mind of some at least of his 
disciples was clinging to the dream of a political 
triumph. "When they therefore were come to- 

12S 



ON MIRACLES 

gether, they asked of him, saying: 'Lord, wilt 
thou at this time restore again the kingdom of 
Israel?' " And Christ put that request gently 
aside: "It is not for you to know the times, or 
the seasons, which the Father hath put in his own 
power." During those forty days he was cleans- 
ing the minds of his followers — the men who were 
to be the first messengers of the completed gospel 
— from political and national dreams. Some- 
thing infinitely greater than a political triumph 
over Rome, an earthly kingship, was the goal of 
Christ's work. That endowment of spiritual 
power which was to come upon them had to be 
explained; they had to learn that proclamation 
of the gospel of salvation through the cross of 
Christ which was to reshape the history of the 
world. 

But what was that mysterious gift of "power" 
that was to equip them for that tremendous task 
which was to come upon them? "Ye shall re- 
ceive power," he said, "when the Holy Ghost is 
come upon you." And their field was to be beyond 
all national victories: "Ye shall be witnesses of 
me, not only in Jerusalem, and in Judsea, and in 
Samaria, but in the uttermost part of the earth." 
No wonder that to set on fire their imagination 
and to kindle their faith to such a scale took forty 
days between the resurrection and the descent of 
the Holy Ghost ! The sense of some great coming 
endowment must have fallen upon them; some 
vision of great spiritual ends to be achieved. The 
petty politics of the nation were forgotten; they 
were learning to think in spiritual terms, in terms 
not of the nation but of the world. Peter, always 
practical, desired to fill up the gap in their organ- 
ic 



WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 

ization made by the crime and death of Judas, 
and he persuaded them to choose one to take his 
place in the apostolate; and the choice was made 
by lot, with due prayer, the lot falling upon 
Matthias. But it is clear that he was not the 
divine choice, for his name is never mentioned 
afterward; God made, in due time, his own 
choice. 

There were three great stages in the salvation 
of the world: (1) the redemptive act of the cross 
itself; (2) the defeat of death achieved for our 
race shown by the resurrection of Jesus Christ. 
But there remained the third event — the entrance 
into human life of a new spiritual force, the Holy 
Ghost, the Agent by which the redemptive forces 
of the cross were to be brought to bear upon hu- 
man lives. And for the descent of that force 
upon the first ministers of the gospel the disciples 
were bidden "to wait" until they had come into 
perfect agreement with the will of God. That 
point at last was reached, and as the story runs: 
" When the day of Pentecost was fully come, they 
were all with one accord in one place. And sud- 
denly there came a sound from heaven as of a 
rushing mighty wind, and it filed all the house 
where they were sitting . . ." 

So the new stage in the spiritual salvation of 
the race came, and the first sign of it was that 
"they began to speak with other tongues, as the 
Spirit gave them utterance." National languages 
are barriers, signs of division, more difficult to 
cross than wide seas or mountain ranges ; and as 
the first sign of the world-wide mission of the com- 
pleted gospel the barriers of speech were broken 
down. This, it will be seen, is the true gospel for 

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ON MIRACLES 

all men and all nations, and with that sermon 
began the new spiritual history of the world. 

No miracle is equal to that which changes the 
human soul, and the apostles themselves were 
visibly transfigured men. The cowards who had 
forsaken their Master, fleeing for their own lives 
and surrendering him to the cross, are lifted up 
now to a mood which shrinks from no peril, which 
has in it a note of triumphant victory. Their 
spokesman is the man who had thrice denied his 
Master when he had fallen into the hands of his 
enemies ; and he now frames against this crowd of 
his fellow countrymen the most terrible of all 
indictments: By wicked hands they had crucified 
and slain "God's messenger, the hope of their 
race." He did not talk of national politics or of 
deliverance from the Roman yoke: "Let all the 
house of Israel know assuredly," ran his message, 
"that God hath made that same Jesus, whom ye 
have crucified, both Lord and Christ." And the 
charge that the hope of their nation had come and 
they had crucified him, driven home by the power 
of the Holy Ghost, melted that crowd of Jews 
into weeping penitence: "Men and brethren," 
they cry, "what shall we do?" And Peter's an- 
swer is exactly in the gospel key: "Repent, and 
be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus 
Christ, for the remission of sins, and ye shall 
receive the gift of the Holy Ghost." 

And as a result of this sermon preached by the 
man who had denied his Master to the very crowd 
who had watched him on the cross the Christian 
church was born! It has stood the test of two 
thousand years. All the miracles which mark the 
ministry of Jesus Christ during his earthly min- 

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WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 

istry in a sense, are trivial compared with the 
miracles which, through twenty centuries, have 
followed his death and resurrection, of which the 
first result was the creation of a church com- 
posed of the disciples who had forsaken and denied 
him, and of a crowd of three thousand converted 
Jews who had mocked him on his cross. This is 
the miracle of miracles ! It has been repeated in 
every age, by martyrs who have died for their 
faith down to our own day, by an unbroken chain 
of missionaries under every sky, and by evangel- 
ists in every nation. For the office of the Holy 
Ghost has never been withdrawn from the work 
of the Christian church. The witness to it is 
an unbroken chain of transfigured lives stretching 
through two thousand years; its result is the 
whole Christian church of to-day. To this very 
hour it keeps its inheritance of miracles! 



132 



BOOK IV 
CHRIST AND THE CRITICS 



"I am the light of the world; he that followeth me shall 
not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life." 

— Johk 8. 12. 

"We live in a world where Jesus is the last word. 3 ' — Glover. 



CHAPTER I 
THE BIOGRAPHY OF CHRIST 

We are all liable to see truth in patches only 
and to see it out of perspective, and it may be 
added that the patch of truth we do see and de- 
light to keep in sight is often determined not by 
its intrinsic importance but by our individual 
preference for it. Now the bias against the mi- 
raculous which affects the Higher Criticism gen- 
erally subtly influences its memory. It predis- 
poses it to let slip some aspects of truth with 
which it is out of sympathy, and this bias deflects 
the judgment of at least some of the Higher 
Critics on Christ himself. They emphasize the 
human element in him and attenuate the divine. 
In particular it makes them confine their analysis 
of Christ to the thirty-three years of his earthly 
life and so they fail to see him in the perspective 
of history. They do not conceive of him as a 
personal Presence still in the world, and in the 
full sweep of his redeeming office and power 
through every day of the two thousand years of 
Christian history, as much as in any day of the 
three years of his ministry in Palestine. The 
wiser minds of the critics, to do them justice, are 
conscious of this peril and it would be amusing, 
if it were not so pathetic, to notice how at the 
Cambridge Conference of the Churchmen's Union 
in 1921 the speakers accuse each other — as one 

135 



WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 

of their number, Mr. Emmet, put it — of "making 
Jesus unimportant and uninteresting." On 
Canon Barnes' description of Jesus Dr. Foakes- 
Jackson is very severe. "The terms he employed," 
he says, "strike one as slightly patronizing." 
Mr. Emmet, in his turn, deals faithfully with both 
Dr. Foakes-Jackson and Dr. Lake in their much- 
debated book, The Begmnings of Christianity. 
"They give us," he says, "a view which suggests 
that though Jesus existed he did not really count. 
It is the picture of a very commonplace and un- 
inspiring prophet, differing from the prophet of 
the Liberal-Protestant in that he only taught 
much what other people had already taught, ex- 
cept for a few original remarks which were either 
untrue or quite unpractical. He allowed his fol- 
lowers to address him as 'Sir,' and he spoke of 
some one else as the Son of Man." "Such a view," 
he argues, "explains neither the figure of Christ 
as given in the gospels, nor the impact of Jesus 
on his age." 

Now that is true but it is not the whole truth. 
To see the true scale of Jesus Christ we must 
measure his impact not only on his age — the 
generation in which he lived — but on all the ages. 
What Christ was, and is, can only be adequately 
measured by the change he has wrought in the 
history of our race; it takes the whole span of 
the centuries to give us the true interpretation 
of his nature and work. And some of the Higher 
Critics in their analysis of Christ somehow for- 
get to take the scale of the centuries by which to 
get the measure of his nature and work. They 
reach what Canon Barnes himself calls "an in- 
genuity of atomic disintegration, which a physi- 

136 



CHRIST AND THE CRITICS 

cist might envy, and so reach rejective conclu- 
sions which leave the personality of Christ ex- 
hausted of the miraculous." Now to explain the 
mark Christ has made, and is still making, on the 
history of our race in such a fashion is like offer- 
ing the skipping-rope of a child as an explanation 
of the pull of gravitation. And the critics fail 
to see that by reducing to the vanishing point the 
element of the miraculous in Christ himself, the 
miraculous quality of his mark on twenty cen- 
turies is increased to the nth. For the biography 
of Christ and the impact of his touch on twenty 
centuries is the very miracle of miracles, and it 
is a miracle of which we ourselves to-day are both 
witnesses and subjects. It has the quality of 
eternity in it. 

And let the secret of that strange power be 
remembered. Christ had foreseen the cross, and 
knew that in it for him was the secret of victory. 
" % if I be lifted up,' he said, 'will draw all 
men unto me.' This he said, signifying by what 
death he should die." And on the cross itself, 
while he hung there, abandoned and dying, he 
began a new discipleship ; he saved the dying thief 
who hung beside him, an act which was a sign of 
the saving power which the cross gave him and 
a prophecy of the victories the cross should win. 
For the world was to be saved not by parables, 
or by miracles, or by wisest teaching, but by the 
one great Redemptive Act, of which the cross was 
the sign and the instrument. Then came the 
resurrection; and the cross, interpreted by the 
resurrection, is not a defeat. For Christ himself, 
for the race for which he died, it was a supreme 
victory, a victory over the last and the darkest 

137 



WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 

of all the forces of evil ; by his death, death itself, 
the final enemy of our happiness, is slain. Here 
is a Force revealed which runs into eternity and 
can change the eternal destiny of every human 
soul committed to it. And it was the cross, linked 
to the twin and completing factor of the resur- 
rection, which gave a new direction to the history 
of our race. 

A complete biography of Jesus Christ would 
overwhelm us with knowledge beyond our power 
as yet to understand. The teaching of Christ, 
even for the apostles whom he drew around him, 
was limited by their capacity to receive it. "I 
have many things to say to you," he told them, 
"but ye are not able yet to receive them." If 
Christ gave us instructions and commandments 
dealing with every imaginable duty and peril 
of human life this would have been too vast either 
for the memory to hold or the mind to compre- 
hend. Christ's method was of an exactly opposite 
character ; he gave principles rather than specific 
commandments. 

Then let it be remembered that Jesus Christ 
came not so much to preach the gospel as to make 
a gospel that could be preached. The supreme 
purpose of his incarnation looked Godward first 
and manward second. It offered a redeeming 
sacrifice for sin which made it possible for God to 
forgive sin; possible, in Paul's words, for God 
"to be just, and yet the justifier" of them that 
believe. It was the twin and equally great pur- 
pose of Christ's earthly life and atoning death to 
create a moral force — a spiritual appeal to the 
conscience, the will, and the heart of fallen men 
and women — sufficient to win them back to God. 

138 



CHRIST AND THE CRITICS 

"I," said Christ, "if I be lifted up from the earth 
will draw all men unto me." And from his cross, 
and by the overwhelming spiritual appeal of his 
cross, by the spiritual forces which stream from 
it, Christ does draw men unto himself. Now, 
whatever the four gospels do not tell us they cer- 
tainly tell us the story of the cross with a clear- 
ness, a fullness, and with a moving power that 
make it the greatest moral force the human race 
knows. And the record that achieves that is the 
"biography of Jesus Christ" — the one biography 
the human race needs. 

So we know when it began; but who shall tell 
us where it ends ? Or has it ended? 

The last picture of Jesus Christ offered to us 
by Saint Luke is as, with lifted hands, he stands 
on the path across the hill just as it dips down 
into Bethany, blessing the little group about him. 
"And it came to pass," says Luke, "that while he 
blessed them, he was parted from them and carried 
up into heaven." Luke does not tell us what 
were the final words with which Christ passed as 
a visible Presence from the sight of his disciples 
but they are given by Matthew. Christ had given 
to the disciples their great command. "Go ye 
therefore and teach all nations . • . to observe 
all things whatsoever I have commanded you." 
These seemed words of farewell; but then came 
the great words which forever canceled them: 
"Zo, J am with you alway, even unto the end of 
the world!" What a sublime paradox! In the 
act of leaving his disciples Christ declares he is 
"with them alway, even unto the end of the 
world"! 

For Christ the flesh was an imprisonment; he 
139 



WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 

was held by it under the limitations of time and 
space. This is why he told his disciples, "It is 
expedient for you that I go away." We are 
tempted to envy the men and women who gathered 
round the visible presence of Christ in the days of 
his earthly ministry. What price would we not 
pay to have the visible Christ passing through 
the streets, say, of London, of Paris, of Sydney, 
the children casting branches before him as he 
walked; the Christ of the miracles, opening blind 
eyes, raising the dead! But we have Christ in a 
greater and more wonderful Presence still with 
us. Christ stepped out of the realm of the flesh 
into the realm of the spirit that he might become 
a Universal Presence; a Presence not only as 
real as he was to the crowds in the streets of 
Capernaum or Jerusalem, but as much closer 
to us than he was to them as the touch of the 
Spirit is closer than the touch of the flesh. 
"Wheresoever," says Christ, "two or three are 
met together in my name, there am I in the midst 
of them." He does not break in upon our senses, 
but, as Tennyson reminds us, "spirit with spirit 
can meet." 

Christ, in plain words, is every man's contem- 
porary ! He is the living Christ of 1922 a. d., as 
he was the Christ of 33 a. d. He is the Christ of 
the Thames, of the Ganges, as surely as he was 
the Christ of the Jordan and Gennesaret, the 
Christ of London and New York as he was the 
Christ of Nazareth and Capernaum. The "bi- 
ography" of Christ takes in the two thousand 
years of Christian history; and what kind of 
events make up this, the true record of Jesus of 
Nazareth ? Every spiritual victory won in the lives 

140 



CHRIST AND THE CRITICS 

of men and women since Christ died on the cross 
is part of his biography. Less than six weeks 
after Peter, a shivering coward at the charge of a 
servant maid, had denied his master with oaths 
and curses he was preaching to a crowd of thou- 
sands of Jews the terrible sermon in which he 
told them that "with wicked hands they had cruci- 
fied and slain" the Christ in whom every hope of 
their nation and of the human race itself had 
come into flower — and he won three thousand 
converts by that one sermon. That is part of the 
"biography" of Jesus of Nazareth ! 

When Stephen, the first Christian martyr, as 
the tempest of cruel stones was beating out his life 
looked up into heaven and with a loud voice cried, 
"Lord Jesus, receive my spirit"; then, kneeling 
down, cried, "Lord, lay not this to their charge" ; 
and when he had said this fell asleep — this, too, 
is part of the biography and record of Christ. 
Paul had an amazing career — he founded church 
after church ; he wrote fourteen out of the twenty- 
one Epistles in the New Testament — tiny bits of 
literature that to-day have more readers and 
touch human life and character with deeper in- 
fluence than the writings of all the poets and sages 
from Plato down to Shakespeare; and he, too, was 
a part of the "biography" of Christ. "It is no 
longer I that live," he said, "it is Christ that 
liveth in me." 

The Christian church itself, with its far-spread 
missions, its countless agencies for healing the 
running sore of the world, is but a part of his 
"biography." The records of twenty Christian 
centuries are so many leaves in that divine record. 
Every man and woman to-day who by Christ's 

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WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 

grace is saved, and who is living by his law and 
in the strength of that grace, is a bit of the 
"biography 55 of Jesus Christ. "Ye are my wit- 
nesses, 55 Christ says to us all. Every pulse of 
spiritual life we feel in our blood comes from 
Christ. "Verily, verily, I say unto you, 55 run 
Christ 5 s words, "he that believeth on me the works 
that I do shall he do also ; and greater works than 
these shall he do, because I go unto my Father. 55 
And if love triumphs over hate in any human life ; 
if purity takes the place of vice, and self-sacri- 
fice displaces selfishness as the rule of conduct; 
that is an effect of which Jesus Christ is the cause. 
It is part of his biography. 

Who shall write this wonderful biography ? No 
human hand can write it; no human mind can 
measure its sweep. To say that the "biography 55 
of Christ can only be written when the latest re- 
cord of time is closed is quite inadequate. The 
measures of time can find no space for this 
"biography. 55 It takes in, and runs through, the 
never-ending ages of eternity. 

The Higher Criticism of to-day, we have said, 
fails by the things it forgets. It would be absurd, 
of course, to say that the scholars and the divines 
who in such numbers call themselves Higher 
Critics do not know as well as their critics know 
that what is here described as the true biography 
of Christ is the part he has played in all the 
centuries behind us and will play in all the cen- 
turies to come. But this is clear — that in the 
published analysis of the character and the work 
of Christ on which they venture with such courage 
the true biography of Christ finds no place. It 
is only by dismissing this from the picture that 

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CHRIST AND THE CRITICS 

Canon Barnes, for example, in the paper he read 
to the Modernist Conference of 1921, found it 
possible to condense an explanation of Christ into 
exactly ten sentences, such as: "His origin was 
humble. It is unlikely that he had an exceptional 
education. Clearly his natural ability was great." 
The explanation of Christ offered again in Peake's 
Commentary by Principal Griffith-Jones is in ex- 
actly the same key. Christ, we are assured, 
"bears mark of the culture and outlook on life 
that belonged to his age and his environment. He 
was one who knew little, if anything, of Greek 
philosophy," etc. This is not the whole Christ; 
it is not the true Christ. How much both these 
Higher Critics have forgotten before packing the 
Christ of all the ages into such a tiny nutshell! 
Mr. Emmet, B.D., as we have shown, warns his 
fellow Higher Critics that their view of Christ 
"does not explain his impact on history"; but 
not even Mr. Emmet makes any attempt to esti- 
mate what the "impact of Christ on history" 
really is. He would have to write what no human 
pen can ever write — "the True Biography of 
Jesus Christ" — to do this ! 



143 



CHAPTER II 

CHRIST AND THE HIGHER CRITICISM 

For all systems of criticism — High or Low — 
the supreme testing-point is that at which they 
touch Christ, and methods and results alike must 
be judged by the place and the degree of au- 
thority they give to him. If they whittle him 
down into merely human terms, deny his Godhead 
and sit in judgment on his words they practically 
rob us of Christ ; and Christianity without Christ 
would leave Jewish history without an explana- 
tion and the Bible without meaning. Historic 
Christianity itself, with its generations of saints, 
its transfiguring effect on history, the innumer- 
able churches in which Christ is preached to-day, 
the missions it sends out, the divine forces with 
which it is penetrating our civilization — all be- 
comes, if Christ be left out, an effect without a 
cause. Principal Griffith- Jones himself says: 
"Our religion stands or falls with faith in the 
Person of the historical Jesus." It may be added 
that he is himself disquieted by the treatment of 
Christ by some of his fellow-critics, and he tries 
to comfort himself and us by saying: "We are 
not in any way forced to concede all that the ex- 
treme critics claim. Much of their attitude of 
dubiety is due not to the pressure of the evidence, 
or to the lack of evidence, but to naturalistic 
preconceptions which force them to minimize the 

144 



CHRIST AND THE CRITICS 

evidence itself and to magnify the discrepancies 
in the narratives." 

But on the other hand, if the claims of Christ 
are admitted — if he is the Incarnate Son of God 
who has come into this world to make a new reve- 
lation of God to us in terms of love, love of which 
the cross is the measure and the expression — this 
must profoundly affect all our views of the Bible. 
When this Christ speaks, even though his words 
run beyond the reach of our human thought they 
must be accepted. We cannot venture to put the 
little tape of our human understanding round his 
infinite knowledge and determine where it ends 
and ignorance takes its place. He comes to judge 
us; we dare not pretend to sit in judgment 
on him. Of two fundamentally opposite courses, 
in brief, only one is logically possible. We may 
accept Christ and sit at his feet; or we may re- 
ject Christ and require him to sit at our feet. 
The third course— impossible to sane reason — is 
to unite both methods, to reduce Christ to human 
dimensions, and yet to insist that he keeps his 
divine offices as the Saviour of our race. 

Now it is exactly at this point that, just now 
at least, the Higher Criticism fails, and it clearly 
fails for a curious reason of which it is apparently 
unconscious. In order to safeguard some of its 
positions, it must undertake an analysis of the 
personality and character of Christ, and de- 
termine the limits within which his authority 
must be accepted and his infallibility be acknowl- 
edged. It finds itself committed to a task in which 
human knowledge has hitherto failed — the task 
of analyzing and defining the psychology of the 
incarnation; a subject on which no information. 

145 



WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 

is given us in the Bible, which may well be beyond 
the reach of any created intelligence, and about 
which a peeping curiosity is nothing less than an 
offense to reason. 

The psychology of the incarnation! This is 
certainly the most tremendous question to which 
the human mind can address itself. The psy- 
chology of a little child, it must be remembered, 
is beyond all human science, and the wisest and 
most loving mother who ministers with the inti- 
mate knowledge only possible to a mother to the 
physical senses of her child cannot yet penetrate 
to the mystery of its unfolding senses. And the 
deeper mystery of how the tiny soul and mind 
within the little figure grow, how they relate them- 
selves to the external world, how memory awakens, 
and makes its records, how intelligence comes — 
what wisest psychological science can read the 
mysterious cipher of even an infant's life! 

But the psychology of the incarnation, the 
relation between the human and the divine in 
Jesus Christ, where one ended and the other be- 
gan; how his infinite knowledge was hidden dur- 
ing the thirty years preceding the moment when 
his great office of Teacher and Saviour of the 
race began ; and whether, and how far, his human 
limitations put in imprisoning darkness his God- 
head, who can solve such problems? Has any 
human being the right to undertake their solu- 
tion? To the critic undertaking such a task we 
might well quote the words of the Samaritan 
woman. "Sir, thou hast nothing to draw with, 
and the well is deep" — too deep for any human 
plummet to sound. And if we must explore and 
with our limited human faculties solve this tre- 

146 



CHRIST AND THE CRITICS 

mendous problem — a problem which might well 
move the awe and tax the faculties of angels — 
at least we should do it in a spirit of almost trem- 
bling reverence. We should put off the shoes 
from our feet before we venture to walk on ground 
so sacred. 

But, strange to say, many of the Higher Critics 
start on this adventure with the most light- 
hearted confidence. Their little human foot rules 
are produced, and they take the measure of 
Christ. A patch here and a patch there is 
snipped off with their tiny scissors and they 
undertake to tell exactly the subiects on which 
Christ was ignorant. The incarnation has for 
them no secrets; they are able to tell us with 
scientific precision the subjects of which Christ 
was ignorant and what was the exact measure of 
that ignorance. They know more, it seems, than 
Christ did, and with their larger information can 
correct his teaching. Nearly all the discussions 
about Christ in the current literature of the 
Higher Criticism are deflected in this direction 
and while this mood lasts that literature — on 
this subject at least — is in quarrel with the gen- 
eral conscience and faith of the Christian church. 
Whatever views we take of the limitations of 
Jesus Christ, no intelligent Christian can consent 
to believe they apply to him as a Saviour, and 
so limited his saving office. 

Christ, it is true, began his earthly life at the 
human level. He was a little child with the help- 
lessness of a little child; he "grew in knowledge" 
as a child. For thirty years he lived under human 
conditions. He was a village carpenter. He knew 
toil and sweat, hunger and cold; and thus, hav- 

147 



WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 

ing satisfied all human conditions, and having 
come for so many years into partnership with us 
in all human relationships and experiences, his 
divine office began. And it began with assuredly 
the full measure of divine knowledge and power. 
What would be his value as a Teacher at this 
stage of the incarnation, if he still kept the un- 
taught mind and the limited knowledge of the 
village carpenter? Shall we touch with our hu- 
man fingers his sayings as they stand recorded in 
the New Testament and say, "Master, here thou 
knowest less than we do; thou earnest to be our 
teacher but we can teach thee! Thou art the 
Light of the world, but on this subject, and on 
that, our little human candles outshine the divine 
flame which streams from thy words" ? 

Bishop Gore discusses with wise and reverent 
insight the question of the limitations of Christ's 
knowledge under the conditions of the incarna- 
tion. Christ himself said, in regard to the mo- 
ment when the great drama of human history 
shall reach its climax, "Of that day and that hour 
knoweth no man. No, not the angels which are 
in heaven, neither the Son." "The limitation of 
knowledge that I can accept on his own au- 
thority," says Bishop Gore, "that I can under- 
stand. I can understand the Divine Person com- 
ing into our human life, to live under its condi- 
tions and its limitations, must have so accepted a 
certain limitation of knowledge, otherwise there 
could have been no true manhood, no real human 
faith and hope." Yes; the limitations to his 
knowledge which Christ himself proclaims and de- 
fines we can all admit. But is a poor human critic 
contemplating Christ through his spectacles, and 

148 



CHRIST AND THE CRITICS 

measuring his knowledge with his tiny human foot 
rule, entitled to say how far the knowledge of 
Christ ran and to fix the exact point at which it 
dissolved into complete ignorance? "He came," 
says Bishop Gore, "to teach men about God and 
lead them to God, and if in his spiritual training 
— and he gave no other — there was mistake and 
delusion, that does not seem to me to be compat- 
ible with the idea of the incarnation." 

Now it is exactly at this point — on the range 
of knowledge possessed by Jesus Christ as 
Teacher and Saviour — that in the general Chris- 
tian judgment the Higher Critics fail. 

We take an example from among the Modern- 
ists. In the paper he read at the Cambridge Con- 
ference Canon Barnes set out by analyzing the 
nature and powers of Jesus Christ: "He was a 
Jew in whom there was no Gentile blood; but 
he was brought up in the half Jewish, partly 
Syrian, and partly Greek environment of Galilee. 
His origin was humble. He came from a work- 
man's home. It is unlikely that he had an excep- 
tional education. Yet though he normally spoke 
Aramaic he could certainly read Hebrew and he 
probably knew Greek. Clearly his natural ability 
was great. He used language with the skill of 
a great artist in words. He had closely studied 
the writings of the greatest religious teachers of 
his race, and his power to cure mental disorder 
was remarkable. His personality was extraor- 
dinarily impressive. He apparently refused to 
admit that he was good as God is good." 

Now there are some sentences in that curious 
bit of literature which by their exaggerated ir- 
relevance must prick the sense of humor as well 

149 



WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 

as shock the reverence of the reader: "His origin 
was humble . . . it is unlikely that he had an ex- 
ceptional education • . . he probably knew 
Greek . . . clearly his natural ability was 
great." If Canon Barnes was writing a testi- 
monial for some one who had been his fellow stu- 
dent it would be worded — with a little variation 
— in very much the same manner. "Jones," he 
would say, "had not the advantages of a good 
education, but he is a good student, and won a 
scholarship at one of the universities. His 
natural ability is great; he has a fine presence 
and a certain bent of mind which would qualify 
him for the medical profession." The sentences 
Canon Barnes expended on the Saviour of the 
world in his paper at Cambridge practically 
amount to a "testimonial" of exactly this kind. 
But how much of Christ they leave out! Even 
his brother critics complained of this. Dr. 
Foakes-Jackson said there was a "patronizing" 
note in what he said of Christ. Mr. Emmet 
accused him of making Christ "unimportant and 
uninteresting." 

Canon Barnes took a degree in science, and is 
tempted to translate his theology into the terms of 
physical science and to judge it by the tests of 
that science. He is in angry and perpetual 
quarrel with the "science of the Old Testament 
Scriptures," and it is not unfair to say that the 
deeper spiritual significance of the Scripture 
documents, the redeeming element in the work of 
Jesus Christ and the spiritual significance of 
his cross find a scanty place in his recollection. 
Here is an example of this : "Jesus in yielding up 
his life gave all that a man can to do God's will. 

150 



CHRIST AND THE CRITICS 

. . . He died that the kingdom of God might 
come. We rightly deem him Lord of the King- 
dom of his Father because he was its perfect 
servant. All who strive to enter in profit by his 
services; they are to this extent enriched by the 
redemptive power of his innocent suffering." To 
this Dr. Foakes- Jackson says: "This passage 
does not describe what was known as 'evangelical' 
teaching, which laid stress on the redemptive, 
sacrificial, and saving power of the cross of Christ. 
An evangelical would no more accept this than 
he would Canon Barnes' description of the humbly 
born descendant of David who rose superior to an 
imperfect education." 

The analysis of the personality of Jesus Christ 
which Principal Griffith-Jones contributes to 
Peake's Commentary on the Bible has a different 
starting-point from that of Canon Barnes. In 
the paper he read before the Cambridge Confer- 
ence Canon Barnes applied the ordinary methods 
of psychology to the personality of Jesus Christ 
purely as a matter of science; but Principal 
Griffith-Jones was engaged in an attempt to dis- 
cover the ultimate seat of authority in religion, 
and he had dismissed in succession the "inner 
light" of the mystic, the historic claim of the 
church, the Protestant theory of the Bible as the 
ultimate standard of religious truth; that, he 
found, was vested in Jesus Christ, and "properly 
understood," he declared, was "a profound truth." 
He proceeded, however, to warn his readers that 
the claim for "the ultimate authority of Jesus 
Christ" was sometimes "affirmed in a way difficult 
any longer to substantiate." The authority of 
Jesus in religion needed to be "more clearly de- 

151 



WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 

fined" than "by our fathers" ; and by way of 
effecting that definition he proceeds, in his turn, 
to explore the psychology of the incarnation, and 
to map out and draw the exact line where the 
knowledge of Jesus Christ became ignorance and 
his claim to be the ultimate authority in religion 
ceased. 

And Principal Griffith-Jones is more courage- 
ous and takes a wider sweep than even Canon 
Barnes. He dismisses Christ as an authority 
from history, science, the Bible, and even from 
one field, at least, of ethics and he does this in 
the interest of certain positions of the Higher 
Criticism. In view of the plain teaching of the 
Bible this might well seem absurd but Principal 
Griffith-Jones knew his business. He begins by 
striking out certain claims usually made for 
Christ; "We cannot claim infallibility for him," 
he says, "in questions of history, such as the au- 
thorship of Old Testament books, or on the prob- 
lems of science. In these directions he must be 
quite frankly considered to have accepted the 
current notions of his time." 

Like Canon Barnes he draws up a catalogue of 
the purely human conditions of Christ's life: 
"Jesus was a Jew of the first century, brought up 
under certain social and intellectual conditions 
very different from our own; bearing marks of 
the peculiar culture and outlook on life that be- 
longed to his age and his environment." He then 
proceeds to recite some irrelevant details, after 
the fashion of Canon Barnes : "He knew little, if 
anything, of Greek philosophy, of Roman law, 
and nothing of the vast accumulation of knowl- 
edge which has been garnered and systematized 

152 



CHRIST AND THE CRITICS 

since his day." Next Principal Griffith-Jones 
draws attention to the uncertainties — or what 
some people call uncertainties — in the text of the 
gospel records : "The records of his life and teach- 
ing," he says, "are such that, while derived for 
the most part from eye-witnesses of his earthly 
presence and ministry, they can scarcely be de- 
scribed as contemporaneous. ... It is impos- 
sible to prove in particular instances that we have 
his ipsissima verba" — a statement which with 
one poor drop of ink seems to exhaust the four 
gospels of historic value. As a result of all this 
we are told: "The conditions under which the gos- 
pel has come down to us leave us free to exercise 
a sane judgment on the applicability of many of 
his maxims to our own times. Their literal appli- 
cation — even if we are persuaded that we have 
them in their original form — is often impossible 
to-day." Therefore, "we are free to exercise our 
sane judgment in regard to these principles of 
Jesus Christ, interpreting them broadly, disen- 
tangling the inner principle from the outer form." 
Now after all this how much of the authority of 
Jesus Christ as the ultimate standard of religious 
truth is left? 

Later in his article Principal Griffith-Jones re- 
peats, enlarges, and makes more specific the state- 
ment: "We are still far from having any proof 
that we have the ipsissima verba of Jesus," by 
adding "or any guarantee that the events of his 
life are related with absolute accuracy in the 
gospels. In some very important passages it is 
impossible to harmonize the various versions. 
This is particularly true of the stories of the 
virgin birth and of the resurrection" (p. 15). 

153 



WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 

Now that, perhaps, is at the same time the most 
disquieting and the most challengeable of the posi- 
tions taken by Principal Griffith-Jones. If this is 
true with what troubled and doubting eyes must 
we learn to read the book once deemed so divine! 
The Bible is a bundle of uncertainties; we may 
admire the beauty of Christ's life and acts, but 
must remember that we are "still far" — in the 
twentieth Christian century — from the certainty 
that these events "are related with absolute ac- 
curacy in the gospels." But what proof is offered 
of this tremendous statement? Have there been 
some discoveries which invalidate all the existing 
records of Christian history? Or in the realm of 
what may be called super-scholarship has some 
new light suddenly shone out which gives a fresh 
aspect to the whole Christian literature? Noth- 
ing of this sort has happened. It has suddenly 
occurred to the critics that Christ committed 
nothing to writing ; his teaching was purely verbal 
and the accounts come to us filtered through all 
the uncertainties of human memory. They would 
not be accepted in any court of justice. 

But the plain man who knows his Bible will 
ask, Is it true that no "guarantee," human or 
divine, has been given to us that the teaching of 
Christ and the events of his life are to be found 
in the gospels? Did not Christ himself leave us 
exactly such a "guarantee" — an express provi- 
sion — that his teaching and the events of his life 
should be accurately remembered and recorded, 
so that in a sense and to the very end of time his 
voice should speak to men? "These things have 
I spoken unto you," he told his apostles, "being 
yet present with you." But he was about to 

154 



CHRIST AND THE CRITICS 

leave them ; what was to fill the emptiness created 
by his departure? "The Comforter," he said, 
"which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father shall 
send in my Name, he shall teach you all things 
and bring all things to your remembrance whatso- 
ever I have said unto you." The Higher Critics 
to sustain their position must either deny the 
existence of that promise or hold that God has 
broken his word and left this great promise un- 
fulfilled. 

But the New Testament as we find it is the ful- 
fillment of that promise, and the inspiration which 
enabled its writers to recall what Christ had said 
and done is still in its very syllables. Its text 
is the channel through which divine light and 
force still stream into human life. The critics 
who expend oceans of ink and tempests of debate 
in settling — or unsettling — the dates of these re- 
cords and their human authorship resemble a 
committee of scientists who, required to give an 
account of the electric light, spend their energies 
on the wire on which the electric force travels and 
leave out of their report the invisible force itself 
which is the light. 

Literature has its miracles, and the New Testa- 
ment is a literary miracle. Its writers were a 
cluster of Galilean fishermen and peasants ; there 
was only one man of genius and scholarship in the 
group. And yet this book has reshaped the his- 
tory of the world! In Stratford-on-Avon stands 
a great building in which all the books which were 
written about Shakespeare's plays are gathered. 
But if all the books which have caught their in- 
spiration from the twenty-seven tiny pamphlets 
which constitute the New Testament were 

155 



WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 

gathered together no building ever yet erected by 
human architecture could contain them. That 
tiny book has built every church throughout 
Christendom. It has inspired all missionary 
effort. Its words are written on the tombstones 
beneath which our dead sleep. And the original 
inspiration which Christ promised was not con- 
fined to the men who wrote it. It is in the book 
itself to-day ; it is within the reach of every reader 
of the book, and all Christian experience attests 
that fact. 

Principal Griffith- Jones, of course, says many 
things about Christ in quite a different key from 
the passages we have quoted, for he still acts on 
his method of talking with two voices. "It is the 
testimony of the Christian consciousness," he 
says, "in all ages that to find Jesus is to find God. 
Beyond him we cannot go in our search for the 
Eternal, who in him has spoken his will as in no 
one else" (p. 8). He closes an article on "the 
Bible: its meaning and aim," with the words, "In 
the future, as in the past, the Bible revelation of 
God to man, of man to himself, is the subject of 
a divine redemption flowing from the Person and 
cross of Christ, and will shine forth with an un- 
dimmed and ever-growing luster" (p. 16). That 
is beautifully said; but if printed in parallel 
columns beside such passages in a totally differ- 
ent key as those we have quoted the plain man 
may well ask, What is its value? 



156 



CHAPTER III 
DID CHRIST CAST OUT DEVILS? 

The Rev. H. G. Wood, M.A., contributes to 
Peake's Commentary a bit of literature which has 
more disquieting qualities in it than perhaps the 
writer himself realizes. He is dealing with those 
miracles in which Christ claimed to cast out devils 
from devil-possessed lives. "Many of the stories 
related of Jesus," says Mr. Wood, "are stories 
of the healing of demoniacs, and in some of the 
cases of the cure of disease the disease is attrib- 
uted to evil powers (for example, Luke 13. 16). 
From Mark's Gospel it appears that the driving 
out of demons was an essential part of the procla- 
mation of the Kingdom. Jesus himself clearly 
believed in demons, and saw a proof of the near- 
ness of the Kingdom in the downfall of their 
power. He apparently accepted the popular 
diagnosis of disease as due to demonic influence. 
But for faith," he adds, "this raises the question 
of the limitations of the knowledge of Jesus" 
(Peake, p. 663). 

Now the question here raised — "the limitations 
of the knowledge of Jesus" — -is one from which the 
human mind might well shrink. The power of 
Christ registers itself in visible signs, but the 
mmd of Christ — what is its height and depth, 
and what the sweep of its knowledge ; what method 
shall we use when we address ourselves to that 

157 



WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 

task? To measure the brain of Plato, to assess 
the dramatic art of Euripides, to weigh in the 
scales of our understanding, and with scientific 
exactness, the genius of myriad-minded Shake- 
speare, might well task any genius. But to under- 
take to define the limitations of the knowledge of 
Jesus Christ, to mark the line when that knowl- 
edge became ignorance — who is sufficient for such 
a task? Mr. H. G. Wood, it may be suggested, 
might feel it too great for him. 

As a matter of fact, however, Mr. Wood, us- 
ing the methods of the Higher Criticism, under- 
takes this task with great confidence; and he is 
able to report that the problem of the relation 
between the human soul and the unseen powers of 
evil was one which "the limitations of the knowl- 
edge of Jesus" made too difficult for him. In his 
diagnosis of this particular problem he blundered ; 
he misread the facts. The "limitations" of his 
knowledge made it possible for him to mistake 
some ordinary trouble of the brain, or of the 
nerves, for a case of Satanic possession. As a 
result Jesus Christ is revealed in the gospel as 
making himself ridiculous by going through the 
form of casting out a devil when no devil existed ! 

Now it is certain that Jesus Christ gave to 
the business of casting out devils a large place in 
his public ministry. He claims such a miracle as 
one of his credentials : "If I, by the finger of God," 
he said, "cast out devils, no doubt the kingdom 
of God is come upon you" (Luke 11. 20). He 
had a formula in working this miracle which 
expressly recognized that some tormenting spirit 
had invaded a human soul. In Saint Mark's 
Gospel — in the very first chapter — the story is 

158 



CHRIST AND THE CRITICS 

told of the man in the synagogue with an unclean 
spirit ; and Jesus "rebuked" the evil and torment- 
ing spirit, saying, "Hold thy peace and come out 
of him." The same formula is used in the de- 
liverance of the devil-possessed wretch in the 
tombs: "Come out of the man, thou unclean 
spirit," said Christ. He endowed his disciples 
with a measure of this power ; to the Twelve when 
he sent them on the first missionary errand he 
gave "power and authority over all devils, and 
to cure diseases." 

It will be remembered that when standing in 
the presence of Festus and Agrippa Paul chal- 
lenged doubt for its credentials. "Why," he 
asked, "should it be thought a thing incredible 
with you that God should raise the dead?" And 
it may be asked with equal confidence, "Why 
should not Christ cast out devils?" It was the 
very purpose of his redeeming work ; he has been 
doing this very work in this troubled world for 
over two thousand years; he is doing it to-day. 
It is a well-known psychological fact that under 
certain evil conditions the power of evil in human 
lives is tragically increased. Missionaries among 
the dark tribes, with their heathen practices, find 
cases which they diagnose with confidence as cases 
of devil-possession. Glover says there are many 
cases of this description in China. And in the 
age in which Christ was born why should we doubt 
there were such cases ? 

Bishop Gore, writing on this subject, says: 
"People glibly say that Christ shared the delu- 
sions of the age as to the existence of evil spirits. 
Well, he certainly talked of evil spirits. He cer- 
tainly looked out upon the evil of the world and 

159 



WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 

he saw in it a rebel will behind men's will. 'An 
enemy/ he said, 'hath done this.' But I have 
yet to learn what is the superior wisdom which 
can say that that estimate of things is wrong in 
spite of and in the face of the experience of all 
the greatest saints of God." "I do not think," 
says Bishop Gore, "he was deluded. I see no right 
that men have to assume the sort of omniscience 
which should declare him in this respect deluded. 
I believe his word." 

Bishop Gore, it will be seen, dryly hints that 
the Higher Critics claim omniscience for them- 
selves in their explanation of what Christ really 
did. The omniscience is still there but it has 
changed its locality. It is the attribute not of 
Christ but of his critics. We are required to be- 
lieve that they are omniscient! 

But could anything more completely destroy 
the sense of the incomparable greatness of Jesus 
Christ, which is of the very essence of his story, 
than the criticism which discovers in Christ the 
characteristics and the limitations of the Galilean 
peasant of his day? He shared, it seems, the 
delusions of the peasantry folk among whom he 
was brought up. He had their rude medical 
theories, their belief in devils as the cause of dis- 
eases, etc. The critic notes his ignorance, his 
lack of outlook, his partnership in the blunders 
and exaggerations of his own followers. The pro- 
found impression that Christ — on any reading — 
made upon his hearers is in this way left unex- 
plained, not to say incredible. Teaching on this 
subject in Peake's Commentary certainly goes 
perilously near making Jesus Christ ridiculous. 
He used the language of a miracle-worker, say- 

160 



CHRIST AND THE CRITICS 

ing to an imaginary devil, "Come out of him!" 
when as a matter of fact a dose of medicine was 
the true remedy needed. 

"The blunder" of Christ is, on the principle of 
the Higher Criticism, explained by what is called 
the doctrine of the Kenosis: in the plan of the 
saving work of Jesus Christ, in order to put his 
human nature on a level with ours he emptied 
himself of his omniscience and stooped, on some 
subjects and for part of his life, to be ignorant; 
and, properly understood, that is certainly true. 
The general faith of the Christian church holds 
that the true Kenosis of Christ, however, stretches 
only through the thirty years in which he shared 
the common limitations of human life. He was 
the Galilean peasant or the village carpenter, 
sharing the toils and living under the conditions of 
those about him. But when he entered on the 
three years of his public ministry, and took up 
his office as a Teacher preparing for the great 
Redeeming Act by which we are saved — his death 
on the cross — we must assume that into every 
stage of that great saving ministry he brought 
all the knowledge necessary to it. To deny that, 
to teach that there was a blunder in the divine 
plan, to assert that Christ as a Teacher had no 
wiser or surer knowledge than the peasants about 
him, is an absurdity which has in it an element of 
blasphemy. 

Now the interpretation of Christ's casting out 
devils which Mr. Wood offers assumes that the 
Kenosis somehow had got out of place; it did take 
in his office of teacher; it applied to the use of 
his miracle-working power! As a result, in the 
very moment and act of performing a miracle he 

161 



WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 

blundered ! It was a double blunder ; it extended 
to his office of teacher and of miracle-worker, for 
he believed and taught that there was a devil to 
be cast out of certain human lives, when as a 
matter of fact there was no devil in the case. And, 
properly considered, the blunder lay not in 
Christ's acting under the limitations of his Ke- 
nosis but in the mistake of the infinite wisdom of 
God, which gave to that Kenosis too wide a limit, 
so that Mr. H. G. Wood is able to report that 
Christ blundered into thinking that he could and 
did cast out a devil from some suffering human 
life, when as a matter of fact the patient only 
required medical treatment. 

Mr. Wood further undertakes to define the 
precise blunder the Saviour committed. The real 
question is as to the reality of demoniacal pos- 
session — was there a devil to be cast out or 
not? But he puts the case in a very curious 
way: "Jesus Christ apparently accepted the 
popular diagnosis of disease as due to demonic 
influence. ... If the belief in demons be 
entirely illusory — a modern assumption which is 
seldom questioned, though it is certainly question- 
able — then Jesus Christ was involved in a popu- 
lar error. If the belief were only in part erro- 
neous — and that it was in part superstitious can 
scarcely be doubted — then our records do not al- 
low us to suppose that Jesus himself ever said 
anything to correct the element of mistake in a 
belief which he shared with the people." 

Note the number of "ifs" in that passage. 
The writer "hedges" ; he obscures his meaning by 
that multiplicity of "ifs." The case as thus 
framed does not rest with the issue of whether 

162 



CHRIST AND THE CRITICS 

there was in the cases dealt with any real devil 
possession. Mr. Wood contents himself by show- 
ing that if the belief in demons was entirely illu- 
sory then Jesus was involved in a popular error. 
If the belief were only in part erroneous then 
Jesus Christ was culpable for not saying any- 
thing to correct the element of mistake in a belief 
which he shared with the common people. 

But it has in it an element of the absurd to 
accuse Christ of failure in duty because he "did 
not correct the element of mistake in a belief 
which he shared with the common people." If 
Christ shared in that statement of belief how 
could he be expected to rebuke it? It was his own 
belief. The reader is tempted to think that Mr. 
Wood must have meant his words to run : "Christ 
failed to correct the element of mistake in a be- 
lief he did not share with the common people." 
If this be so Mr. Wood really brings a moral 
charge against Christ, the charge that while he 
knew the people were wrong in their diagnosis 
of the case of the demoniac he did not correct 
that wrong; nay, he traded on it by pretending 
to perform a miracle which was a sham! 

An ignorant Christ! A Christ whose limita- 
tions of knowledge are so narrow that his diag- 
nosis of even a sick body is not to be trusted! 
How much of hope slips out of human life if that 
be true! The New Testament claims again and 
again in every form of speech that Christ knew 
all men. "He needed not that any should testify 
of men, for he knew what was in men." He knew 
men as they did not know themselves ; those inner- 
most depths of personality, whose underlying 
motives and springs of action of which the pos- 

163 



WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 

sessor himself perhaps is not aware — every secret 
in the heart and conscience of men who were 
about him — all those lay open to his eyes. And 
this in part was the secret of Christ's power, the 
proof of his divine nature, for who can know 
what is in men but he who made men? 

"He took the suffering human race; 
He read each wound, each weakness clear." 



And the perfect knowledge of Christ, rightly 
understood, is a reason not for fear but for hope; 
for it is love that knows us, the insight of love 
that reads our secrets, the love which alone can 
supply the remedy. Christ thrice asked the man 
who had thrice denied him the question: "Simon 
Peter, lovest thou me?" and at the third appeal 
Peter cries, "Lord, thou knowest all things ; thou 
knowest I love thee." He could not have dared 
to call his fellow apostles to witness of his love 
for his Master ; they knew his triple failure. But 
they did not know all things; and Peter turned 
his appeals from the half-knowledge, the partial 
judgment, of his comrades to the all-seeing knowl- 
edge of Christ. 

But Mr. H. G. Wood thinks that we have to 
deal not with One who knows all things but One 
who is ignorant of a great many things; and if 
he blundered in reading the trouble of a sick body 
— a trouble perhaps of the nerves or the brain — 
how can we trust his diagnosis of our spiritual 
nature? The fatal — the unforgivable — effect of 
all such critical interpretations of Christ and his 
character and work is to belittle him. He was 
less than we imagined him to be; less than the 

164 



CHRIST AND THE CRITICS 

faith of b3'gone saints held him to be; than the 
hymns our children sing make him out to be. All 
our hymn-books would have to be revised if we 
accept the Christ offered to us in some pages in 
Peake's Commentary as an accurate portrait. 
Wesley says: 

"Thou, O Christ, art all I want; 
More than all in thee I find;" 

but certainly the Christ who was so ignorant that 
he mistook, say, a nerve trouble for a case of 
diabolic passion, and believed that he had cast 
that non-existent devil out by a gesture, is not 
one to sing hymns about. "Jesus Christ,' 5 says 
Glover, in his Jesus of History, "transcends our 
categories and classification. We never exhaust 
him, and one element of Christian happiness is 
that there is always more in him than we sup- 
posed." But the critics labor with pathetic dili- 
gence to prove that there is less in Jesus Christ 
than we suppose! It is a very unlovely business. 



165 



CHAPTER IV 

OPPOSING VOICES 

It will help our readers, perhaps, to set the 
actual words on some of the greater subjects in 
debate, both of the Bible and of its critics, side 
by side in parallel columns, and it will be seen at 
a glance how wide is the interval between them. 
To compare what Christ says and claims about 
himself, and what some of his own ministers — the 
expositors and teachers of the Christian creed — 
have to say on what Christ claims may well per- 
plex the plain mind. The critics are sincere; 
they are quite unconscious of any offense against 
either reason or faith in what they say. They 
believe quite honestly, indeed, that they are ren- 
dering a great and much-needed service to truth 
by their criticisms. And yet to plain sense the 
conflict of views thus presented has a tragical 
quality in it. 

What the Critics say : What the Bible says : 

"There is not, either "He that receiveth 

in Church or in Bible, not my words hath one 

any infallible author- that judgeth him; the 

ity for doctrinal truth, word that I have 

and we should face spoken, the same shall 

the fact." — Professor judge him in the last 

Sorley, Modern day." — John 12. 48. 

Churchman, p. 318. "The word which ye 

"No belief, however hear is not mine, but 

166 



CHRIST AND THE CRITICS 



scriptural we may be 
able to prove it, can 
claim the serious atten- 
tion of thoughtful men 
and women to-day 
merely because it is 
scriptural." — Rev. R. 
G. Parsons, Modern 
Churchman, p. 301. 



"There is no more 
reason for supposing 
that Jesus of Nazareth 
knew more than his 
contemporaries about 
the true scientific ex- 
planation of the mental 
diseases which current 
belief attributed to dia- 
bolic possession than 
that he knew more 
about the authorship 
of the Pentateuch or 
the Psalms." — Dean 
Rashdai/l, Modern 
Churchman, p. 281. 

"Belief in the infalli- 
bility of Jesus is the 



the Father's which sent 
me." — John 14. 24. 

"I have given unto 
them the words which 
thou gavest me; and 
they have received 
them, and have known 
surely that I came out 
from thee." — John 8. 
17. 

"Then Simon Peter 
answered him, Lord, to 
whom shall we go? 
Thou hast the words of 
eternal life." — John 
6. 68. 

"I am the light of the 
world; he that follow- 
eth me shall not walk 
in darkness, but shall 
have the light of life." 
—John 8. 12. 

"That was the true 
Light which lighteth 
every man that cometh 
into the world." — 
John 1. 9. 

"For whosoever shall 
be ashamed of me and 
of my words, of him 
shall the Son of Man 
be ashamed when he 
shall come in his own 
glory, and in his Fa- 



167 



WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 



modern form of Doce- 
tism." 1 — Peake's Com- 
mentary, p. 663. 

"We are still far 
from having any proof 
that we have the ipsis- 
sima verba of Jesus or 
any guarantee that the 
events of his life are re- 
lated with absolute ac- 
curacy in the gospels. 
* . . It is no longer 
possible to insist on the 
literal accuracy of the 
gospel narratives." — 
Peake's Commentary, 
p. 15. 



"The kingdom of 
God is a social ideal." 
— Canon Barnes, Mod- 



therms and of the holy 
angels." — Luke 9. 26. 



"But the Comforter, 
which is the Holy 
Ghost, whom the Fa- 
ther will send in my 
name, he shall teach 
you all things, and 
shall bring all things 
to your remembrance 
whatsoever I have said 
unto you." — John 14. 
26. 

"That which was 
from the beginning, 
which we have heard, 
which we have seen 
with our eyes, which we 
have looked upon, and 
our hands have handled, 
of the Word of Life. 
. . . That which we 
have seen and heard 
declare we unto you." 
— 1 John 1. 1-3. 

"The kingdom of 
God is within you." — 
Luke 17. 21. 



J The Docetic doubted the reality of the incarnation, and says that our 
Lord's humanity was an appearance only, and nothing more. — Bishop 
Lightfoot, Biblical Essays, p. 113. Docetism: A term used to describe 
the opinion that the body of Christ was merely a phantom. — Eadies Cy- 
clopaedia, p. 222. 

168 



CHRIST AND THE CRITICS 



em 
347. 



Churchman, p. 



"The kingdom of 
God is not meat and 
drink, but righteous- 
ness and peace and joy 
in the Holy Ghost."— 
Romans 14. 17. 



"Jesus claimed to be 
God's Son in a moral 
sense, in the sense in 
which all human beings 
are sons of God." — H. 
D. A. Major, B.D., 
Modern Churchman, p. 
276. 

"He was in the high- 
est sense a Son of God, 
not in spite of his hu- 
manity, but because his 
humanity was uniquely 
perfect." — Canon 
Glazebrook, Modern 
Churchman, p. 210. 

"What do we mean 
precisely when we as- 
cribe divinity to Jesus? 
The leaders of the Con- 
ference are agreed in 
their answer that the 
deity of Jesus is to be 
seen in his perfect hu- 
manity." — H. D. A. 
Major, B.D., Modern 
Churchman, p. 196. 



"In the beginning 
>fras the Word, and the 
Word was with God, 
and the Word was God. 
The same was in the be- 
ginning with God. All 
things were made by 
him; and without him 
was not any thing 
made that was made." 
— John 1. 1-4. 

"I and my Father 
are one." — John 10. 
30. 

"Ye believe in God; 
believe also in me." — 
John 14, 1. 

"Verily, verily, I say 
unto you, Before Abra- 
ham was, I am." — 
John 8. 58. 



169 



WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 



"I do not for a mo- 
ment suppose that 
Jesus ever thought of 
himself as God. Nor 
do I think that even 
the fourth Gospel so re- 
presents him." — Pro- 
fessor J. F. Bethune- 
Baker, Modem 

Churchman, p. 291. 

"Jesus did not claim 
ilivinity for himself : 
Never in any critically 
well-attested sayings is 
there anything which 
suggests that his con- 
scious relation to God 
was other than that of 
a man towards God — 
the attitude which he 
wished that all men 
should adopt towards 
God." — Dean Rash- 
dai/l, Modem Church- 
man, p. 275. 

"Whatever Jesus 
means by calling him- 
self Son of God, or by 
saying (if he did say), 
'I and My Father are 
one, 5 it is clear that he 
did not mean that he 
was identical, or (to 
use a metaphor) co-ex- 
tensive with God." — 



170 



"And the Word was 
made flesh, and dwelt 
among us, (and we be- 
held his glory, the 
glory as of the only be- 
gotten of the Father), 
full of grace and 
truth."— John 1. 14. 

"He was in the world, 
and the world was made 
by him, and the world 
knew him not." — 
John 1. 10. 

"Who being the 
brightness of his glory, 
and the express image 
of his person, and up- 
holding all things by 
the word of his power, 
when he had by himself 
purged our sins, sat 
down on the right hand 
of the Majesty on 
high." — Hebrews 1. 3. 

What the Nicene 

Creed says: 

"I believe in . . . 
one Lord Jesus Christ, 
the only-begotten Son 
of God, Begotten of his 
Father before all 
worlds, God of God, 
Light of Light, Very 
God of Very God, Be- 



CHRIST AND THE CRITICS 



Nowekl Smith, M.A., 
Modem Churchman, p. 
267. 

Jesus was "genuine- 
ly, utterly, completely, 
unreservedly human, a 
Palestinian Jew, a Gal- 
ilean, a man who ex- 
pressed himself in and 
through the conditions 
and limitations of life 
and thought peculiar 
to his own times and to 
the race of which he 
was a member." — Rev. 
R. G. Parsons, Modern 
Churchman, p. 306. 



gotten, not made, Be- 
ing of one substance 
with the Father, by 
whom all things were 
made: Who for us men 
and for our salvation 
came down from heaven 
. . . and was made 
man, And was crucified 
also for us under Pon- 
tius Pilate." 



171 



CHAPTER V 
THE CLAIMS OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM 

The courage with which some, at least, of the 
Higher Critics proclaim the certainty of their own 
views is almost of an heroic quality; it defies 
doubt ; it talks with a certain accent of infallibil- 
ity. In his Fernley Lecture, for example, the Rev. 
G. Jackson, D.D., at present one of the tutors of 
the Wesleyan Church, said, "Christ's authority 
cannot be invoked to invalidate the findings of 
Biblical criticism ;" and this he claimed was "now 
admitted on all hands, a few protesting voices 
merely emphasizing the general consent." That 
statement has what may be called the true Vatican 
accent of infallibility. 

In the same lecture Dr. Jackson said, "We no 
longer believe that a Bible statement is necessarily 
true simply because it is a Bible statement." If 
cross-examined Dr. Jackson would probably 
qualify and explain those words. In a sense they 
are, of course, true. "Skin for skin, all that a 
man has will he give for his life," is a statement 
found in the Bible; but the speaker is Satan and 
the statement is a lie. But the average reader will 
certainly understand Dr. Jackson to mean that 
there is no certainty about the whole text of the 
Bible. Nobody can be quite sure of the truth of 
any passage in it. And every reader, on Dr. Jack- 
son's principle, has the right Dr. Jackson himself 

172 



CHRIST AND THE CRITICS 

claims and exercises to sit in judgment on the 
Bible, and reject any passage in it which does not 
satisfy his taste or conscience. He may do this 
on the ground that Christ did not actually speak 
the words ascribed to him; or that if he did the 
reader of to-day knows better than Christ and can 
correct his views. Dr. Jackson, it may be taken 
for granted, does not mean this ; he believes pro- 
foundly in the divinity of Christ, in the truth of 
the gospel message and the general authenticity 
of the gospel records. But he permits himself to 
make unguarded utterances that, in the etymolog- 
ical sense of the word, "offend" — make to stumble 
— the little ones of Christ's flock. 

But later Higher Critics talk about the Bible 
in accents quite as positive as those of Dr. Jack- 
son, and still less capable of explanation. Thus 
at the Modern Churchmen's Conference of 1921 
the Rev. R. G. Parsons, M.A., laid down as a pos- 
tulate that "No belief, however scriptural we may 
be able to prove it, can claim the serious atten- 
tion of thoughtful men and women to-day merely 
because it is scriptural." 1 At the same Conference 
Professor Sorley said, "There is not, either in 
church or in Bible, any infallible authority for 
doctrinal truth, and we should face the fact." 2 It 
requires some courage to resist the learned names 
and loud assurances flung at us in a fashion so 
positive, and on the subject of the Higher Criti- 
cism a Reign of Terror of a mild and foolish sort 
exists. It claims to represent a "liberal reading of 
religion," an "advanced theology and scholar- 



1 Modern Churchman, p. 301. 
^Modern Churchman, p. 318. 

173 



WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 

ship;" to reject it is to be out of key with modern 
thought, etc., and such arrogant and semi-Papal 
utterances impress simple and timid souls. 

But all this is pure nonsense ; and while there is 
much in the Higher Criticism that is true and that 
is doing real service for truth, there is much also 
that cannot survive the test of plain common 
sense ; and these extravagant statements about the 
Bible are of that character. Butler, with whom 
common sense rose to the height of genius, wrote 
in his Analogy: "There are persons who think it 
a strong objection against the authority of Scrip- 
ture that it is not composed by rules of art agreed 
upon by critics, for polite and correct writing. 
And the scorn is inexpressible with which some of 
the prophetic parts of Scripture are treated. . . . 
But upon supposition of a revelation, it is highly 
credible beforehand we should be incompetent 
judges of it to a great degree, and that it would 
contain many things appearing to us liable to 
great objections in case we judge of it otherwise 
than by the analogy of nature." 1 And to quote 
his often-quoted words: "As we are in no sort 
judges beforehand by what laws or rules, in what 
degree, or by what means, it were to have been 
expected that God would naturally instruct us ; so, 
upon supposition of his affording us light and 
instruction by revelation, additional to what he 
has afforded us by reason and experience, we are in 
no sort judges by what methods, and in what pro- 
portion, it were to be expected that this super- 
natural light and instruction would be afforded 



^Analogy, p. 219. 

174 



CHRIST AND THE CRITICS 

It is well to remember that when the divine book 
is dismissed by so many of the Higher Critics as 
an authoritative standard of truth in religion, all 
the writers in the Bible — prophets and psalmists, 
together with Christ and all his apostles — are dis- 
missed too; and as we have no record of what 
Christ was, or of what he did and taught except 
such as we find in the Bible we are left stranded 
and bankrupt. Christ's own words bid us "Search 
the Scriptures, for in them ye think ye have eter- 
nal life; and they are they which testify of me" 
(John 5. 39). But if there is nothing in the Scrip- 
tures which "can claim the thoughtful attention 
of men anl women as being scriptural," then even 
Christ's own voice as he speaks in the New Testa- 
ment Scriptures loses its authority. What, then, 
is left to us? 

The position of the Higher Criticism is that 
certainty in religious matters is to be found not 
in the Bible but in something outside the Bible. 
Now what is that? Some will say that our own 
intelligence is the judge as to the credibility of 
what the Bible says; anything outside its reach 
has no authority, either for the intellect or for 
the conscience. And as "intelligence" is a variable 
quantity in human lives it seems clear that no 
generally accepted religious faith is possible; each 
man will make his own Bible. Principal Griffith- 
Jones tells us, "It is the testimony of the Chris- 
tian conscience of all ages that to find Jesus is to 
find God," and we may find him in the Bible — as 
the result of certain emotions in ourselves. But 
since, as Professor Sorley assures us, there is not 
in the Bible "any infallible authority for doctrinal 
truth," to go to the Bible to find that infallible 

175 



WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 

authority — in the Person of Jesus — is to seek the 
living among the dead. The Higher Critics should 
come to some arrangement among themselves. 

It is perfectly intelligible that when the in- 
carnate Son of God comes among us as our 
teacher his words and thoughts would move in 
wider curves than those of our human thoughts. 
If, indeed, he told us nothing we could not find 
out for ourselves or could not adequately judge 
for ourselves his mission as a teacher was unneces- 
sary. But once let the great fact of Christ's 
divinity and of his office as teacher be accepted 
and we stand in a new relation to the Scriptures. 
They judge us; we cannot pretend to judge them* 
And if Principal Griffith-Jones analyzed his own 
spiritual experience he would certainly discover 
that the "triumphant experience" of which he 
speaks did not precede faith in the Person, in the 
teaching, and the redeeming work of Jesus Christ, 
which he found recorded in the Bible ; that trium- 
phant experience came second. And it is cer- 
tainly doubtful whether the triumphant experi- 
ence of believing men and women in all ages will 
find its inspiration in the attenuated Christ the 
Higher Criticism presents us; a Christ about 
whom we may walk, foot rule in hand, and say, 
"Here, and here, thou art completely wrong, O 
Christ, and our larger knowledge rebukes thy 
ignorance." Will that reading of Christ, trans- 
lated into hymns, reach the high note set in the Te 
Deum: 

"Thou art the King of Glory, O Christ," 

or will it awaken the lyrical gladness of one of 
Charles Wesley's hymns: 

176 



CHRIST AND THE CRITICS 

"O for a thousand tongues to sing 

My great Redeemer's praise; 
The glories of my God and King, 
The triumphs of his grace." 

What is, for the plain man, the conclusion of 
the whole matter? He carries no flag in this war. 
It is a debate which for the most part moves on a 
plane too high for him. But of some methods of 
our Higher Critics he can judge. It is a question 
not of scholarship but of common sense. And 
that the critics are not correct in some of their 
conclusions, too, is a matter which lies within his 
knowledge. When they are agreed, and the de- 
bate on any question has really reached finality, 
then the plain man will be cheerfully willing to 
accept the verdict of scholars. Meanwhile he can 
certainly wait with calmness the far-off day of 
decision. He knows very well that no final con- 
clusion on many questions has yet arrived and 
that it may never arrive. "To assume," says Dr. 
Robertson Nicoll, "that the particular conclu- 
sions which are favored by the majority of schol- 
ars at the beginning of the twentieth century will 
be equally in favor at the beginning of the twenty- 
first is to be blind to all the lessons of experience. 
Criticism has changed, and will change, but the 
Word of God remains. 55 

The plain man, in brief, does not share the 
alarms of those nervous souls who think that the 
Christian faith is to be destroyed by a little ink 
from a German inkpot. His certainty that the 
Bible is the Word of God — a light to his feet and 
a lamp to his path — cannot be destroyed by a 
hasty and probably inaccurate article in a re- 
view. Whatever records leap to light, he is sure 

177 



WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 

that the Word of God will stand. And why is he 
so sure? Because he knows that the real question 
about the Bible lies in another than a literary 
realm. Its "evidences" lie elsewhere. They can- 
not be decided by purely literary and antiquarian 
debates. 

For the divine book is not a fossil, the remains 
of some strange form of life dug up from ancient 
strata and on which geologists and antiquarians 
may hold learned debate, fitting bone to bone and 
reconstructing the living form. It is a living book. 
It has hands and feet and wings. It is "quick and 
powerful, sharper than any two-edged sword, 
piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and 
spirit, and of the joints and marrow." How can 
a problem in biology be settled by archaeological 
or antiquarian guesses? 

Even questions of secular history are not al- 
ways — or solely — to be determined by such meth- 
ods. Suppose the question in debate to be 
whether the Normans, in the eleventh century, 
conquered England. The proof of the Norman 
conquest lies in the England of to-day. The rec- 
ord of Domesday Book is on ten thousand title- 
deeds. The story of William the Conqueror is 
not a question of contemporaneous records only; 
it is attested by the whole history of England 
ever since ; by its existing institutions ; by the very 
family names in a thousand English households 
to-day. 

And so, when we discuss the authenticity of 
New Testament records, we have to take into the 
argument twenty centuries of Christian history; 
the existence of the Christian church; the inef- 
faceable mark on civilization the story of Christ 

178 



CHRIST AND THE CRITICS 

has made, and the literature it has produced. 
And yet many Higher Critics insist upon trying 
what may be called a problem in biology by 
purely antiquarian tests. "I know the Bible to 
be true," said Coleridge, "because it finds me, in 
the deepest places of my nature, as no other book 
does ;" and the unlearned man or woman, who has 
no claims to scholarship, but, like Cowper's hero- 
ine, "knows, and only knows, her Bible true," 
reads the divine book, and finds the inspiration 
in it is as undeniable as the electric current in 
the wire is, when the flame of its light is filling 
the room. 

"There are two ways at least," says Professor 
Denney, "in which the Bible can be read. It can 
be read with an historical or with a spiritual in- 
terest. The historian is concerned with the dif- 
ferences in it. Even when he is aware of a unity 
which overrules them his attention is concen- 
trated on the sundry times and divers manners 
in which this unity is revealed. When he admits 
that God has spoken, his aim is to distinguish as 
clearly as possible the many parts and many 
ways in which he has done so; his interest is set 
not on what God is saying but on what, in cir- 
cumstances which can never be exactly repeated, 
God long ago said. 

"This is not the point of view of the ordinary 
Bible reader nor is it that of the church. Their 
interest in the Bible is spiritual and is therefore 
concerned with its unity, not with the distinctions 
in it; they hearken not for what God said to the 
fathers but for what he is saying to themselves. 
They do not aim at reaching this through any 
intellectual process exercised upon the results at- 

179 



WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 

tained by historical study; they count on enjoy- 
ing it with an immediacy like that of the senses. 
They open their Bibles, and expect to see the 
Light of God as directly as they see the sunshine 
when they open their eyes in the morning; and 
they are confident, too, that they do see it." 

Who can doubt the sunlight when it lies on the 
whole landscape, and stains with beauty the leaf 
of every flower? Beyond the sacred page the 
plain-minded Christian seeks, and finds, the Lord. 
The Holy Ghost, who moved the far-off apostle 
or prophet to write the message, floods the mind of 
the devout reader to-day with light that he may 
understand what he reads. And as he reads his 
Bible is strangely and divinely translated into per- 
sonal terms. Every promise becomes a personal 
promise ; every warning a personal warning ; every 
message a personal message. And the truth of 
promise, and warning, and message finds constant 
verification in daily life. So the unlearned Chris- 
tian hears afar off the clamor of the critics and 
can afford to smile at it. 



180 



SUMMARY 

Among the Higher Critics of the day are many 
entitled by scholarship and character to respect, 
and in the literature of the Higher Criticism 
there is much to be read with admiration and 
profit. But there is also in that literature, taken 
as a whole, a visible want of the steadying force 
of a deep and settled faith; faith that has its 
roots in the Divine Word, and in the character 
and redeeming work of Jesus Christ. It is too 
often the literature of men who have not found 
the truth but who are seeking it, and seeking it 
without any c|ear vision of what it is they seek 
or any sense of divine guidance in the search. It 
is a literature of guesses, usually of contradic- 
tory guesses, of theories that for their fragile 
structure resemble bubbles and are as transitory 
as bubbles. It resembles a landscape in which 
the law of gravitation exists only in patches: 
there are wide stretches in which there is con- 
fusion instead of order, uncertainty instead of 
certainty. 

Much that was said at the Modernist Confer- 
ence at Cambridge seems to the plain man to 
deny the Divine Nature of Jesus Christ and to 
substitute in its stead the divine nature of man. 
"I should keep the Te Deum," says Dean Inge, 
"and drop the three Creeds." "Where he (the 
Modernist) differs from the traditionalist," says 
Mr. Major, "is in claiming the right and duty 
under the progressive revelation of the Holy 

181 



WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 

Spirit to reinterpret and even to reject any state- 
ment m the Creed which may become incredible 
as the result of reverent search." 1 Dr. Harris, 
in his Creeds or No Creeds, reads this on the part 
of Mr. Major as a denial of fixed truths in re- 
ligion : All beliefs are provisional ; the Modernist 
claims liberty — if sufficient evidence emerged — to 
teach (1) Theism; (2) Pantheism; (3) Polyg- 
amy, the Community of Wives, etc. This is 
pushing Mr. Major's principles to the extreme, 
but it is certainly true that the attitude of the 
Modernists is one of welcome to the unknown if 
not of mistrust for the known. 

Dr. Bethune-Baker, who is Lady Margaret 
Professor of Divinity at Cambridge and has 
charge of the instruction of candidates for or- 
dination, has views which have undergone many 
changes, and his latest view of the Person of 
Christ is "only a bridge from the past to the 
present, and," he adds, "we ought perhaps to be 
content if most of our [Modernist] friends get 
on it and stay there safely, refusing to follow 
the more active among us, who are exploring the 
country beyond" (p. 318). ... "I can make 
no use," he said at Cambridge, "of the traditional 
beliefs in either the miraculous birth or the per- 
sonal pre-existence of Christ. I do not for a 
moment suppose that Jesus ever thought of him- 
self as God. Jesus was . . . the actualized 
ideal of man, man at the end of his evolution, 
complete." Another view of this curious Pro- 
fessor of Divinity is . . . "[Creatures] are 
. • . as necessary to the existence of God as he 
is to theirs. Neither is complete without the 

^Modernist, pp. 302-8. 

182 



SUMMARY 

other. . . • In us he lives and moves and has 
his being." 

Mr. Major again, in the Modem Churchman 
for September, 1921, affirms that "the 'Sub- 
stances' of the Deity and of the Humanity [of 
Christ] are not two, but one" ; that "Perfect 
Humanity is Deity under human conditions" ; 
that "there is not a vast gulf between the Divine 
Nature and Human Nature." 

Dr. Barnes is always eccentric as a theologian 
and his latest excursion in theology disposes of 
the Doctrine of the Trinity. "We identify," he 
says, "the Lord with the Spirit ; when after death 
his human limitations were transcended, the liv- 
ing Christ became one with the Holy Spirit; in 
the end I feel no hesitation in affirming that 
Jesus rose from the dead to become the Living 
Christ, One with the Holy Spirit." 

Dr. Rashdall, a very courageous Modernist, 
at the Cambridge Conference contended that 
Jesus "did not claim Divinity ;" that a "Divinity 
of Christ" — if it existed — "did not imply omnis- 
cience;" that "All men are partakers of the 
Divine nature . . . every human soul reveals, 
reproduces, and incarnates God to some extent." 
So "we are justified in thinking of God as like 
Christ . . . and this is the true meaning for 
us of the doctrine of Christ's divinity." "This" 
— is the dry comment of Dr. Rashdall's fellow 
Modernist, Dr. Foakes-Jackson — "this may be 
good philosophy, but is it historical Christian- 
ity?" 

The position of Dr. Foakes-Jackson himself in 
this dance of opposing theories is perhaps the 
strangest of all. He is shrewd enough to see 

183 



WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 

that the position of his fellow Modernists is im- 
possible and even absurd. "They present," he 
says, "a non-miraculous, non-mysterious, easily 
understood religion. The only question is whether 
this is Christianity? This worship of the Ideal 
Man is not Christianity, which is the acceptance 
of salvation through Christ alone." 

But to comfort us we are assured there is "a 
very small body of theologians in England" — of 
whom Dr. Foakes-Jackson himself is one — "who 
are determined to sift the matter to the bottom" 
— and, in brief, to discover real Christianity J 
After two thousand years of history, during 
which the Christ of the gospels has been saving 
men and reshaping history, its real secret, it 
seems, is yet to be discovered ; we shall know what 
Christ was, and what he has done and can do for 
us and for our race, when Dr. Foakes-Jackson 
and "the very small body of theologians" asso- 
ciated with him have "sifted the matter to the bot- 
tom." Meanwhile, little children have to be 
taught, dying men and women have to be com- 
forted, men in captivity to sin have to be saved* 
and all this must wait till a very small cluster 
of theologians in England have "discovered" 
Christ. 

The civilized world during the past few months 
has been watching an heroic attempt in another 
realm, the attempt of a little cluster of English- 
men to climb to the highest peak on the globe — 
Mount Everest. Perhaps never before have such 
daring heights been reached nor the possibilities 
of human endurance been so taxed. These ad- 
venturers climbed into an attenuated atmosphere 
some twenty-seven thousand seven hundred feet 

184, 



SUMMARY 

above the sea in which they could only breathe 
with the help of oxygen masks. They fought 
with snow and tempest, they struggled up the ice- 
clad slippery heights on which human feet had 
never before climbed — and it ended in a failure 
with a loss of many gallant lives. But the ad- 
venture is to be undertaken again next year and 
some day one or two semi-frozen figures will no 
doubt climb to the highest peak on Mount 
Everest. 

Now this is an adventure, in theological terms, 
corresponding to the attempt to climb Mount 
Everest in physical terms, to which Dr. Foakes- 
Jackson and the few gallant spirits associated 
with him are committed — the heroic resolve of "a 
very small body of theologians" in England who 
"are determined to sift the matter to the bot- 
tom" and — at last — find out what Christ is, 
and where he is, and what he has done and can 
do for us. 

And will they find the Saviour of the world 
perched on heights where human lungs can 
scarcely breathe, and shrouded in fog and tem- 
pest? Those theologians are looking for the 
Saviour of the world in the wrong direction. The 
Saviour of the world is one who seeks us; his 
pierced feet tread every path where human feet 
stumble on that divine errand. And it is not the 
scholar by virtue of his scholarship — the humanly 
wise man, and as the reward of his erudition — 
who reaches the saving knowledge of Jesus Christ. 
"I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and 
earth," said Christ himself, "because thou hast 
hidden these things from the wise and prudent, 
and hast revealed them unto babes. Even so, 

185 



WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 

Father, for so it seemed good in thy sight." 
"Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy 
laden, and I will give you rest." 

It is clear that the Higher Criticism proceeds 
on a theory of the relation between man and God 
which in effect denies one of the great redeeming 
offices of Jesus. "I am come," said Christ, "to 
seek and to save that which was lost." "I am the 
Good Shepherd," etc., and all the offices of the 
Good Shepherd Christ fulfills. He goes after the 
lost sheep, he does not wait till they have discov- 
ered him. He treads with bleeding feet the dark 
path of death itself to find them. This is the 
wonder, the mystery, the splendor of the Chris- 
tian message. It is the expression and proof of 
the tremendous fact that God wants his fallen 
creature man more than man wants him; for he 
is the seeker. Now practically all the discussions 
by the Higher Criticism of the place of Christ in 
our redemption proceed on the theory that the 
sheep have to do the seeking ! We have to discover 
Christ; to find out by the research of learned 
experts where he is and what he can do for us. 
His offices and their limitations have to be scien- 
tifically ascertained, and by methods impossible 
to the unlearned. We have, in the New Testament, 
the records of Christ's teaching for three years, 
but they are two thousand years distant, and it 
seems that these teachings are deplorably uncer- 
tain, not to say deficient. Their record is un- 
trustworthy; we are told that we cannot be sure 
that the words of Christ in any certainty have 
reached us. What are recorded have the mystery 
of ciphers ; sometimes they are of doubtful moral 

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value, so that we find It necessary to sit in judg- 
ment on them and mend or even reject them. Dr. 
Rashdall, for example, reports confidently that 
"the Kenosis of Christ stretches through the 
whole thirty-three years of his earthly career" ; 
so that Christ's ministry as a teacher, as we have 
said, was marked by the limitations common to 
all of us. If all this is true it practically amounts 
to a denial not only of Christ's historical office 
as the Good Shepherd who came twenty centuries 
ago to seek the lost sheep of our race but to the 
conception of any contemporary Christ of to-day 
actually treading — though with unseen feet — 
every path of sin and suffering that he may save 
men. 

The Higher Criticism, again, proceeds on the 
theory that the real discovery of what Christ is, 
and is seeking to do, is the business of scholars; 
the unlearned must wait till dead languages are 
deciphered and experts agree as to their meaning; 
or the discovery of an ancient manuscript buried 
and forgotten for centuries may at any moment 
alter the whole structure of the Christian faith. 
The whole business is one for the experts ; God, 
that is, must be sought through the intellect and 
translated into the terms of the intellect. 

Now that is a profound misreading of the whole 
significance of the Christian faith. The intellect 
has a great office in religion ; nothing which is in 
fundamental quarrel with it can be true. But 
God's plans out-run the sweep of our minds, or 
they would not be his thoughts ; and the point 
at which God and man meet is that of the sub- 
mitted will and the living heart. God himself 
has intellect in infinite terms, but he is love ; and 

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it is in terms of love and at the point of love that 
God and man meet. Not the clever brain but the 
loving heart best understands God. "Beloved," 
says John, "let us love one another, for love is of 
God, and every one that loves is born of God and 
knows God. He that loveth not knoweth not God : 
for God is love." Now in these simple words there 
is hidden a profounder philosophy than Plato 
knew! 

Paul was one of the great intellects of our race, 
certainly one of the most accomplished scholars 
of his day; but the famous chapter in the First 
Epistle to the Corinthians is exactly in the words 
of John. When in another letter Paul wants to 
describe how and by what channels in our nature 
God reveals himself to us, he says, "God who com- 
manded light to shine out of darkness hath shined 
in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge 
of God in the face of Jesus Christ." In the face 
of Jesus Christ; the words seem a flash of poetry. 
But the profoundest philosophy is in them. The 
true lens through which we may look into the 
heart of God is the cross on which the Eternal 
Son of God died for us — the rebels of the universe. 
The Higher Criticism fails, if not to see this, at 
least to emphasize this. 

In the literature of the Higher Criticism, again, 
Christ is nearly always contemplated through the 
perspective of two thousand years. He is not 
quite a theological corpse to be dissected and dis- 
cussed, and packed into definitions, but he is 
certainly a remote figure ; what he was or was not, 
what he did and said, and what of reliability the 
record possesses — these are the questions that 
clearly keep busy the pens of the Higher Critics, 

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SUMMARY 

But the contemporary Christ — the Christ of to- 
day — the Christ who said, "Lo, I am with you 
alway to the end of the world," and keeps his 
word — this is the Christ which most concerns us. 
When De Quincey lay dying he asked his daughter 
to lighten the bed-clothes pressing on his feet. 
"You know," said the dying man with a touch of 
mingled pathos and humor, "they are the feet that 
Christ washed !" And is it not divinely true that 
in that act the hands that washed the feet of the 
men whom Jesus knew were about to forsake him — 
nay, the feet of the man who had already betrayed 
him — touch, across two thousand years, all human 
feet? The personal touch of Christ is on us all; 
"closer than breathing" is he. We live and per- 
form every act in his presence. He is touching 
us every moment. 

This is certainly not the Christ chiefly discussed 
in the literature of the Higher Criticism; and if 
it were realized by some of the critics themselves 
it might be suspected that it would curiously 
affect their utterances. The criticism of a Christ 
as far from us as the fixed stars seems easy and 
safe; but suppose, for example, Christ is present 
and is listening! Suppose a conference of the 
Higher Critics, such as that lately in session at 
Cambridge, were being held, and Christ him- 
self being present as a listener ; would any speaker 
have the courage to compliment him by saying 
that his intelligence while he was on earth was 
really "above the average"; or another to com- 
plain that " he knew little or nothing of Greek 
philosophy," or that the record of his teaching 
was so deplorably imperfect that nobody could 
be sure that one of his actual words had actually 

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WHERE THE HIGHER CRITICISM FAILS 

reached us; or yet another to point out that 
Christ shared the common delusions of his age 
and race, and in particular claimed to have cast 
out quite a number of devils which really had no 
existence? Would not the visible presence of 
Christ have hushed such comments on his na- 
ture and work? And the presence of Christ was 
there ! 

The persistent, confident doubts as to miracles 
Christ is recorded to have performed some years 
ago would again fall silent if due regard was given 
to the spiritual miracles he is doing to-day, in the 
streets and homes of every city in the world and 
on lonely mission stations under every sky. When 
considered, the phenomena of converted men and 
women, of human lives cleansed, of human tem- 
pers changed, are "miracles" verified and attested 
in innumerable lives. For the spiritual universe 
as surely as the physical is under the realm of 
law ; the whole universe of God is a unit ; and the 
change of that most stubborn thing in the world, 
the very character of a man, is a miracle far more 
wonderful than that which gave sight to blind 
eyes and cleansed with a touch the flesh of a leper. 
And yet they are, if not denied, treated as if of 
no value! 

The Higher Criticism, to sum up, is a perfectly 
legitimate branch of Bible study ; it has rendered 
at some points real and great service to the Chris- 
tian faith, and may well continue to render fur- 
ther service. But it visibly has some great and 
deadly perils, of which the less wise of the Higher 
Critics at least are mournfully unconscious, but 
of whose existence the Higher Criticism itself 
gives too many proofs. The catalogue in it of 

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SUMMARY 

things forgotten, of truths seen askew or out of 
focus or even in contradiction to the plain mean- 
ing of the Bible, is such that the common sense 
of the plain man can judge of them with con- 
fidence, and — in some case at least — can dismiss 
them with a smile. 



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